John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:09:59 GMT

INTRODUCTION

America is about to enter a presidential election year. Although the outcome is of course impossible to predict at this stage, certain features of the campaign are easy to foresee. The candidates will inevitably differ on various domestic issues—health care, abortion, gay marriage, taxes, education, immigration—and spirited debates are certain to erupt on a host of foreign policy questions as well. What course of action should the United States pursue in Iraq? What is the best response to the crisis in Darfur, Iran's nuclear ambitions, Russia's hostility to NATO, and China's rising power? How should the United States address global warming, combat terrorism, and reverse the erosion of its international image? On these and many other issues, we can confidently expect lively disagreements among the various candidates.
   Yet on one subject, we can be equally confident that the candidates will speak with one voice. In 2008, as in previous election years, serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one foreign country—Israel—as well as their determination to maintain unyielding U.S. support for the Jewish state. Each candidate will emphasize that he or she fully appreciates the multitude of threats facing Israel and make it clear that, if elected, the United States will remain firmly committed to defending Israel's interests under any and all circumstances. None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the United States ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. Any who do will probably fall by the wayside.
This observation is hardly a bold prediction, because presidential aspi
rants were already proclaiming their support for Israel in early 2007. The process began in January, when four potential candidates spoke to Israel's annual Herzliya Conference on security issues. As Joshua Mitnick reported in Jewish Week, they were "seemingly competing to see who can be most strident in defense of the Jewish State." Appearing via satellite link, John Edwards, the Democratic party's 2004 vice presidential candidate, told his Israeli listeners that "your future is our future" and said that the bond between the United States and Israel "will never be broken." Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spoke of being "in a country I love with people I love" and, aware of Israel's deep concern about a possible nuclear Iran, proclaimed that "it is time for the world to speak three truths: (1) Iran must be stopped; (2) Iran can be stopped; (3) Iran will be stopped!" Senator John McCain (R-AZ) declared that "when it comes to the defense of Israel, we simply cannot compromise," while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) told the audience that "Israel is facing the greatest danger for [sic] its survival since the 1967 victory."1
   Shortly thereafter, in early February, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) spoke in New York before the local chapter of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where she said that in this "moment of great difficulty for Israel and great peril for Israel . . . what is vital is that we stand by our friend and our ally and we stand by our own values. Israel is a beacon of what's right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism."2 One of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), spoke a month later before an AIPAC audience in Chicago. Obama, who has expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians' plight in the past and made a brief reference to Palestinian "suffering" at a campaign appearance in March 2007, was unequivocal in his praise for Israel and made it manifestly clear that he would do nothing to change the U.S.-Israeli relationship.3 Other presidential hopefuls, including Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, have expressed pro-Israel sentiments with equal or greater ardor.4
   What explains this behavior? Why is there so little disagreement among these presidential hopefuls regarding Israel, when there are profound disagreements among them on almost every other important issue facing the United States and when it is apparent that America's Middle East policy has gone badly awry? Why does Israel get a free pass from presidential candidates, when its own citizens are often deeply critical of its present policies and when these same presidential candidates are all too willing to criticize
many of the things that other countries do? Why does Israel, and no other country in the world, receive such consistent deference from America's leading politicians?
   Some might say that it is because Israel is a vital strategic asset for the United States. Indeed, it is said to be an indispensable partner in the "war on terror." Others will answer that there is a powerful moral case for providing Israel with unqualified support, because it is the only country in the region that "shares our values." But neither of these arguments stands up to fair-minded scrutiny. Washington's close relationship with Jerusalem makes it harder, not easier, to defeat the terrorists who are now targeting the United States, and it simultaneously undermines America's standing with important allies around the world. Now that the Cold War is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public, or even raise the possibility.
   There is also no compelling moral rationale for America's uncritical and uncompromising relationship with Israel. There is a strong moral case for Israel's existence and there are good reasons for the United States to be committed to helping Israel if its survival is in jeopardy. But given Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, moral considerations might suggest that the United States pursue a more evenhanded policy toward the two sides, and maybe even lean toward the Palestinians. Yet we are unlikely to hear that sentiment expressed by anyone who wants to be president, or anyone who would like to occupy a position in Congress.
   The real reason why American politicians are so deferential is the political power of the Israel lobby. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. As we will describe in detail, it is not a single, unified movement with a central leadership, and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that "controls" U.S. foreign policy. It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel's case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state. The various groups that make up the lobby do not agree on every issue, although they share the desire to promote a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Like the efforts of other ethnic lobbies and interest groups, the activities of the Israel lobby's various elements are legitimate forms of democratic political participation, and they are for the most part consistent with America's long tradition of interest group activity.
Because the Israel lobby has gradually become one of the most powerful
interest groups in the United States, candidates for high office pay close attention to its wishes. The individuals and groups in the United States that make up the lobby care deeply about Israel, and they do not want American politicians to criticize it, even when criticism might be warranted and might even be in Israel's own interest. Instead, these groups want U.S. leaders to treat Israel as if it were the fifty-first state. Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby's clout. They all know that any politician who challenges its policies stands little chance of becoming president.

THE LOBBY AND U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:09:00 GMT

THE LOBBY AND U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY

The lobby's political power is important not because it affects what presidential candidates say during a campaign, but because it has a significant influence on American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. America's actions in that volatile region have enormous consequences for people all around the world, especially the people who live there. Just consider how the Bush administration's misbegotten war in Iraq has affected the long-suffering people of that shattered country: tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes, and a vicious sectarian war taking place with no end in sight. The war has also been a strategic disaster for the United States and has alarmed and endangered U.S. allies both inside and outside the region. One could hardly imagine a more vivid or tragic demonstration of the impact the United States can have—for good or ill— when it unleashes the power at its disposal.
   The United States has been involved in the Middle East since the early days of the Republic, with much of the activity centered on educational programs or missionary work. For some, a biblically inspired fascination with the Holy Land and the role of Judaism in its history led to support for the idea of restoring the Jewish people to a homeland there, a view that was embraced by certain religious leaders and, in a general way, by a few U.S. politicians. But it is a mistake to see this history of modest and for the most part private engagement as the taproot of America's role in the region since World War II, and especially its extraordinary relationship with Israel today.5 Between the routing of the Barbary pirates two hundred years ago and World War II, the United States played no significant security role anywhere in the region and U.S. leaders did not aspire to one.6 Woodrow Wilson did endorse the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which expressed Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine), but Wilson did virtually nothing to
advance this goal. Indeed, the most significant U.S. involvement during this period—a fact-finding mission dispatched to the region in 1919 by the Paris Peace Conference under the leadership of Americans Henry Churchill King and Charles Crane—concluded that the local population opposed continued Zionist inroads and recommended against the establishment of an independent Jewish homeland. Yet as the historian Margaret Macmillan notes, "Nobody paid the slightest attention." The possibility of a U.S. mandate over portions of the Middle East was briefly considered but never pursued, and Britain and France ended up dividing the relevant portions of the Ottoman Empire between themselves.7
   The United States has played an important and steadily increasing role in Middle East security issues since World War II, driven initially by oil, then by anticommunism and, over time, by its growing relationship with Israel. America's first significant involvement in the security politics of the region was a nascent partnership with Saudi Arabia in the mid-1940s (intended by both parties as a check on British ambitions in the region), and its first formal alliance commitments were Turkey's inclusion in NATO in 1952 and the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in 1954.8 After backing Israel's founding in 1948, U.S. leaders tried to strike a balanced position between Israel and the Arabs and carefully avoided making any formal commitment to the Jewish state for fear of jeopardizing more important strategic interests. This situation changed gradually over the ensuing decades, in response to events like the Six-Day War, Soviet arms sales to various Arab states, and the growing influence of pro-Israel groups in the United States. Given this dramatic transformation in America's role in the region, it makes little sense to try to explain current U.S. policy—and especially the lavish support that is now given to Israel—by referring to the religious beliefs of a bygone era or the radically different forms of past American engagement. There was nothing inevitable or predetermined about the current special relationship between the United States and Israel.
   Since the Six-Day War of 1967, a salient feature—and arguably the central focus—of America's Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. For the past four decades, in fact, the United States has provided Israel with a level of material and diplomatic support that dwarfs what it provides to other countries. That aid is largely unconditional: no matter what Israel does, the level of support remains for the most part unchanged. In particular, the United States consistently favors Israel over the Palestinians and rarely puts pressure on the Jewish state to stop building settlements and roads in the West Bank. Although Presidents Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush openly favored the creation of a viable Palestinian state, neither was willing to use American leverage to make that outcome a reality.
   The United States has also undertaken policies in the broader Middle East that reflected Israel's preferences. Since the early 1990s, for example, American policy toward Iran has been heavily influenced by the wishes of successive Israeli governments. Tehran has made several attempts in recent years to improve relations with Washington and settle outstanding differences, but Israel and its American supporters have been able to stymie any detente between Iran and the United States, and to keep the two countries far apart. Another example is the Bush administration's behavior during Israel's war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Almost every country in the world harshly criticized Israel's bombing campaign—a campaign that killed more than one thousand Lebanese, most of them civilians—but the United States did not. Instead, it helped Israel prosecute the war, with prominent members of both political parties openly defending Israel's behavior. This unequivocal support for Israel undermined the pro-American government in Beirut, strengthened Hezbollah, and drove Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah closer together, results that were hardly good for either Washington or Jerusalem.
   Many policies pursued on Israel's behalf now jeopardize U.S. national security. The combination of unstinting U.S. support for Israel and Israel's prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory has fueled anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world, thereby increasing the threat from international terrorism and making it harder for Washington to deal with other problems, such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program. Because the United States is now so unpopular within the broader region, Arab leaders who might otherwise share U.S. goals are reluctant to help us openly, a predicament that cripples U.S. efforts to deal with a host of regional challenges.
   This situation, which has no equal in American history, is due primarily to the activities of the Israel lobby. While other special interest groups— including ethnic lobbies representing Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans, and Indian Americans—-have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions that they favored, no ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest. The Israel lobby has successfully convinced many Americans that American and Israeli interests are essentially identical. In fact, they are not.
   Although this book focuses primarily on the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests, the lobby's im
pact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well. Take Israel's settlements, which even a writer as sympathetic to Israel as Leon Wieseltier recently called a "moral and strategic blunder of historic proportions."9 Israel's situation would be better today if the United States had long ago used its financial and diplomatic leverage to convince Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and instead helped Israel create a viable Palestinian state on those lands. Washington did not do so, however, largely because it would have been politically costly for any president to attempt it. As noted above, Israel would have been much better off if the United States had told it that its military strategy for fighting the 2006 Lebanon war was doomed to fail, rather than reflexively endorsing and facilitating it. By making it difficult to impossible for the U.S. government to criticize Israel's conduct and press it to change some of its counterproductive policies, the lobby may even be jeopardizing the long-term prospects of the Jewish state.

THE LOBBY'S MODUS OPERANDI

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:08:05 GMT

THE LOBBY'S MODUS OPERANDI

It is difficult to talk about the lobby's influence on American foreign policy, at least in the mainstream media in the United States, without being accused of anti-Semitism or labeled a self-hating Jew. It is just as difficult to criticize Israeli policies or question U.S. support for Israel in polite company. America's generous and unconditional support for Israel is rarely questioned, because groups in the lobby use their power to make sure that public discourse echoes its strategic and moral arguments for the special relationship.
   The response to former President Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Carter's book is a personal plea for renewed American engagement in the peace process, based largely on his considerable experience with these issues over the past three decades. Reasonable people may challenge his evidence or disagree with his conclusions, but his ultimate goal is peace between these two peoples, and Carter unambiguously defends Israel's right to live in peace and security. Yet because he suggests that Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories resemble South Africa's apartheid regime and said publicly that pro-Israel groups make it hard for U.S. leaders to pressure Israel to make peace, a number of these same groups launched a vicious smear campaign against him. Not only was Carter publicly accused of being an anti-Semite and a "Jew-hater," some critics even charged him with being sympathetic to Nazis.10 Since the
lobby seeks to keep the present relationship intact, and because in fact its strategic and moral arguments are so weak, it has little choice but to try to stifle or marginalize serious discussion.
   Yet despite the lobby's efforts, a considerable number of Americans—almost 40 percent—recognize that U.S. support for Israel is one of the main causes of anti-Americanism around the world. Among elites, the number is substantially higher.11 Furthermore, a surprising number of Americans understand that the lobby has a significant, not always positive influence on U.S. foreign policy. In a national poll taken in October 2006, 39 percent of the respondents said that they believe that the "work of the Israeli lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran."12 In a 2006 survey of international relations scholars in the United States, 66 percent of the respondents said that they agreed with the statement "the Israel lobby has too much influence over U.S. foreign policy."13 While the American people are generally sympathetic to Israel, many of them are critical of particular Israeli policies and would be willing to withhold American aid if Israel's actions are seen to be contrary to U.S. interests.
   Of course, the American public would be even more aware of the lobby's influence and more tough-minded with regard to Israel and its special relationship with the United States if there were a more open discussion of these matters. Still, one might wonder why, given the public's views about the lobby and Israel, politicians and policy makers are so unwilling to criticize Israel and to make aid to Israel conditional on whether its actions benefit the United States. The American people are certainly not demanding that their politicians support Israel down the line. In essence, there is a distinct gulf between how the broader public thinks about Israel and its relationship with the United States and how governing elites in Washington conduct American policy.
   The main reason for this gap is the lobby's formidable reputation inside the Beltway. Not only does it exert significant influence over the policy process in Democratic and Republican administrations alike, but it is even more powerful on Capitol Hill.14 The journalist Michael Massing reports that a congressional staffer sympathetic to Israel told him, "We can count on well over half the House—250 to 300 members—to do reflexively whatever AIPAC wants." Similarly, Steven Rosen, the former AIPAC official who has been indicted for allegedly passing classified government documents to Israel, illustrated AIPAC's power for the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg by putting a napkin in front of him and saying, "In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of
seventy senators on this napkin."15 These are not idle boasts. As will become clear, when issues relating to Israel come to the fore, Congress almost always votes to endorse the lobby's positions, and usually in overwhelming numbers.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT THE ISRAEL LOBBY?

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:36:32 GMT

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT THE ISRAEL LOBBY?

Because the United States is a pluralist democracy where freedom of speech and association are guaranteed, it was inevitable that interest groups would come to dominate the political process. For a nation of immigrants, it was equally inevitable that some of these interest groups would form along ethnic lines and that they would try to influence U.S. foreign policy in various ways.16 Cuban Americans have lobbied to maintain the embargo on Castro's regime, Armenian Americans have pushed Washington to acknowledge the 1915 genocide and, more recently, to limit U.S. relations with Azerbaijan, and Indian Americans have rallied to support the recent security treaty and nuclear cooperation agreements. Such activities have been a central feature of American political life since the founding of the country, and pointing them out is rarely controversial.17
   Yet it is clearly more difficult for Americans to talk openly about the Israel lobby. Part of the reason is the lobby itself, which is both eager to advertise its clout and quick to challenge anyone who suggests that its influence is too great or might be detrimental to U.S. interests. There are, however, other reasons why it is harder to have a candid discussion about the impact of the Israel lobby.
   To begin with, questioning the practices and ramifications of the Israel lobby may appear to some to be tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of Israel itself. Because some states still refuse to recognize Israel and some critics of Israel and the lobby do question its legitimacy, many of its supporters may see even well-intentioned criticism as an implicit challenge to Israel's existence. Given the strong feelings that many people have for Israel, and especially its important role as a safe haven for Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and as a central focus of contemporary Jewish identity, there is bound to be a hostile and defensive reaction when people think its legitimacy or its existence is under attack.
   But in fact, an examination of Israel's policies and the efforts of its American supporters does not imply an anti-Israel bias, just as an examination of the political activities of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) does not imply bias against older citizens. We are not challenging
Israel's right to exist or questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish state. There are those who maintain that Israel should never have been created, or who want to see Israel transformed from a Jewish state into a binational democracy. We do not. On the contrary, we believe the history of the Jewish people and the norm of national self-determination provide ample justification for a Jewish state. We think the United States should stand willing to come to Israel's assistance if its survival were in jeopardy. And though our primary focus is on the Israel lobby's negative impact on U.S. foreign policy, we are also convinced that its influence has become harmful to Israel as well. In our view, both effects are regrettable.
   In addition, the claim that an interest group whose ranks are mostly Jewish has a powerful, not to mention negative, influence on U.S. foreign policy is sure to make some Americans deeply uncomfortable—and possibly fearful and angry—because it sounds like a charge lifted from the notorious Protocols of the Elders ofZion, that well-known anti-Semitic forgery that purported to reveal an all-powerful Jewish cabal exercising secret control over the world.
   Any discussion of Jewish political power takes place in the shadow of two thousand years of history, especially the centuries of very real anti-Semitism in Europe. Christians massacred thousands of Jews during the Crusades, expelled them en masse from Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and other places between 1290 and 1497, and confined them to ghettos in other parts of Europe. Jews were violently oppressed during the Spanish Inquisition, murderous pogroms took place in Eastern Europe and Russia on numerous occasions, and other forms of anti-Semitic bigotry were widespread until recently. This shameful record culminated in the Nazi Holocaust, which killed nearly six million Jews. Jews were also oppressed in parts of the Arab world, though much less severely.18
   Given this long history of persecution, American Jews are understandably sensitive to any argument that sounds like someone is blaming them for policies gone awry. This sensitivity is compounded by the memory of bizarre conspiracy theories of the sort laid out in the Protocols. Dire warnings of secretive "Jewish influence" remain a staple of neo-Nazis and other extremists, such as the hate-mongering former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, which reinforces Jewish concerns even more.
   A key element of such anti-Semitic accusations is the claim that Jews exercise illegitimate influence by "controlling" banks, the media, and other key institutions. Thus, if someone says that press coverage in the United States tends to favor Israel over its opponents, this may sound to some like the old canard that "Jews control the media." Similarly, if someone points out that
American Jews have a rich tradition of giving money to both philanthropic and political causes, it sounds like they are suggesting that "Jewish money" is buying political influence in an underhanded or conspiratorial way. Of course, anyone who gives money to a political campaign does so in order to advance some political cause, and virtually all interest groups hope to mold public opinion and are interested in getting favorable media coverage. Evaluating the role of any interest group's campaign contributions, lobbying efforts, and other political activities ought to be a fairly uncontroversial exercise, but given past anti-Semitism, one can understand why it is easier to talk about these matters when discussing the impact of the pharmaceutical lobby, labor unions, arms manufacturers, Indian-American groups, etc., rather than the Israel lobby.
   Making this discussion of pro-Israel groups and individuals in the United States even more difficult is the age-old charge of "dual loyalty." According to this old canard, Jews in the diaspora were perpetual aliens who could never assimilate and be good patriots, because they were more loyal to each other than to the country in which they lived. The fear today is that Jews who support Israel will be seen as disloyal Americans. As Hyman Bookbinder, the former Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, once commented, "Jews react viscerally to the suggestion that there is something unpatriotic" about their support for Israel.19
Let us be clear: we categorically reject all of these anti-Semitic claims.
   In our view, it is perfectly legitimate for any American to have a significant attachment to a foreign country. Indeed, Americans are permitted to hold dual citizenship and to serve in foreign armies, unless, of course, the other country is at war with the United States. As noted above, there are numerous examples of ethnic groups in America working hard to persuade the U.S. government, as well as their fellow citizens, to support the foreign country for which they feel a powerful bond. Foreign governments are usually aware of the activities of sympathetic ethnically based interest groups, and they have naturally sought to use them to influence the U.S. government and advance their own foreign policy goals. Jewish Americans are no different from their fellow citizens in this regard.20
   The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort. It is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie. Pro-Israel groups in the United States are engaged in the same enterprise as other interest groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the AARP, or professional associations like the American Petroleum Institute, all of which also work hard to influence congressional legislation and presidential priorities, and which, for the most part, operate in the open.
With a Few exceptions, to be discussed in subsequent chapters, the lobby's actions are thoroughly American and legitimate.
   We do not believe the lobby is all-powerful, or that it controls important institutions in the United States. As we will discuss in several subsequent chapters, there are a number of cases where the lobby did not get its way. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of evidence that the lobby wields impressive influence. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most important pro-Israel groups, used to brag about its own power on its website, not only by listing its impressive achievements but also by displaying quotations from prominent politicians that attested to its ability to influence events in ways that benefit Israel. For example, its website used to include a statement from former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt telling an AIPAC gathering, "Without your constant support. . . and all your fighting on a daily basis to strengthen [the U.S.-Israeli relationship], it would not be."21 Even the outspoken Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who is often quick to brand Israel's critics as anti-Semites, wrote in a memoir that "my generation of Jews . . . became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy. We did a truly great job, as far as we allowed ourselves, and were allowed, to go."22
   J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper the Forward and the author of Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, nicely captures the difficulty of talking about the lobby: "It seems as though we're forced to choose between Jews holding vast and pernicious control or Jewish influence being non-existent." In fact, he notes, "somewhere in the middle is a reality that none wants to discuss, which is that there is an entity called the Jewish community made up of a group of organizations and public figures that's part of the political rough-and-tumble. There's nothing wrong with playing the game like everybody else."23 We agree completely. But we think it is fair and indeed necessary to examine the consequences that this "rough-and-tumble" interest group politics can have on America and the world.

HOW WE MAKE OUR CASE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:35:37 GMT

HOW WE MAKE OUR CASE

To make our case, we have to accomplish three tasks. Specifically, we have to convince readers that the United States provides Israel with extraordinary material aid and diplomatic support, the lobby is the principal reason for that support, and this uncritical and unconditional relationship is not in the American national interest. To do so, we proceed as follows.
   Chapter 1 ("The Great Benefactor") addresses the first issue directly, by describing the economic and military aid that the United States gives to Israel, as well as the diplomatic backing that Washington has provided in peace and in war. Subsequent chapters also discuss the different elements of U.S. Middle East policy that have been designed in whole or in part to benefit Israel vis-a-vis its various rivals.
   Chapters 2 and 3 assess the main arguments that are usually invoked to justify or explain the exceptional amount of support that Israel receives from the United States. This critical assessment is necessary for methodological reasons: in order to properly assess the impact of the Israel lobby, we have to examine other possible explanations that might account for the "special relationship" that now exists between the two countries.
   In Chapter 2 ("Israel: Strategic Asset or Liability?"), we examine the familiar argument that Israel deserves lavish support because it is a valuable strategic asset. We show that although Israel may have been an asset during the Cold War, it is now increasingly a strategic liability. Backing Israel so strongly helps fuel America's terrorism problem and makes it harder for the United States to address the other problems it faces in the Middle East. Unconditional support for Israel also complicates U.S. relations with a number of other countries around the world, thereby imposing additional costs on the United States. Yet even though the costs of backing Israel have risen while the benefits have declined, American support continues to increase. This situation suggests that something other than strategic imperatives is at work.
   Chapter 3 ("A Dwindling Moral Case") examines the different moral rationales that Israelis and their American supporters often use to explain U.S. support for the Jewish state. In particular, we consider the claim that the United States backs Israel because of shared "democratic values," because Israel is a weak and vulnerable David facing a powerful Arab Goliath, because its past and present conduct is more ethical than its adversaries' behavior, or because it has always sought peace while its neighbors always chose war. This assessment is necessary not because we have any animus toward Israel or because we think its conduct is worse than that of other states, but because these essentially moral claims are so frequently used to explain why the United States should give Israel exceptional levels of aid. We conclude that while there is a strong moral case for Israel's existence, the moral case for giving it such generous and largely unconditional support is not compelling. Once again, this juxtaposition of a dwindling moral case and ever-increasing U.S. backing suggests that something else must be at work.
Having established that neither strategic interests nor moral rationales
can fully explain U.S. support for Israel, we turn our attention to that "something else." Chapter 4 ("What Is the 'Israel Lobby'?") identifies the lobby's different components and describes how this loose coalition has evolved. We stress that it is not a single unified movement, that its different elements sometimes disagree on certain issues, and that it includes both Jews and non-Jews, including the so-called Christian Zionists. We also show how some of the most important organizations in the lobby have drifted right-ward over time and are increasingly unrepresentative of the larger populations on whose behalf they often claim to speak.
   This chapter also considers whether Arab-American groups, the so-called oil lobby, or wealthy Arab oil producers are either a significant counterweight to the Israel lobby or even the real driving forces behind U.S. Middle East policy. Many people seem to believe, for example, that the invasion of Iraq was mostly about oil and that corporate oil interests were the primary movers behind the U.S. decision to attack that country. This is not the case: although access to oil is obviously an important U.S. interest, there are good reasons why Arab Americans, oil companies, and the Saudi royal family wield far less influence on U.S. foreign policy than the Israel lobby does.
   In Chapter 5 ("Guiding the Policy Process") and Chapter 6 ("Dominating Public Discourse"), we describe the different strategies that groups in the lobby use in order to advance Israel's interests in the United States. In addition to direct lobbying on Capitol Hill, the lobby rewards or punishes politicians largely through an ability to guide the flow of campaign contributions. Organizations in the lobby also put pressure on the executive branch through a number of mechanisms, including working through government officials who are sympathetic to their views. Equally important, the lobby has gone to considerable lengths to shape public discourse about Israel by putting pressure on the media and academia and by establishing a tangible presence in influential foreign policy think tanks. Efforts to shape public perceptions often include charging critics of Israel with anti-Semitism, a tactic designed to discredit and marginalize anyone who challenges the current relationship.
   These tasks accomplished, Part II traces the lobby's role in shaping recent U.S. Middle East policy. Our argument, it should be emphasized, is not that the lobby is the only factor that influences U.S. decision making in these issues. It is not omnipotent, so it does not get its way on every issue. But it is very effective in shaping U.S. policy toward Israel and the surrounding region in ways that are intended to benefit Israel—and believed also to benefit the United States. Unfortunately, the policies it has successfully en
couraged have actually done considerable harm to U.S. interests and have been harmful to Israel as well.
   Following a brief introduction to set the stage, Chapter 7 ("The Lobby Versus the Palestinians") shows how the United States has consistently backed Israel's efforts to quell or limit the Palestinians' national aspirations. Even when American presidents put pressure on Israel to make concessions or try to distance the United States from Israel's policies—as President George W. Bush has attempted to do on several occasions since September 11—the lobby intervenes and brings them back into line. The result has been a worsening image for the United States, continued suffering on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, and a growing radicalization among the Palestinians. None of these trends is in America's or Israel's interest.
   In Chapter 8 ("Iraq and Dreams of Transforming the Middle East"), we show how the lobby—and especially the neoconservatives within it—was the principal driving force behind the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. We emphasize that the lobby did not cause the war by itself. The September 11 attacks had a profound impact on the Bush administration's foreign policy and the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But absent the lobby's influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States and a boon for Iran, Israel's most serious regional adversary.
   Chapter 9 ("Taking Aim at Syria") describes the evolution of America's difficult relationship with the Assad regime in Syria. We document how the lobby has pushed Washington to adopt confrontational policies toward Syria (including occasional threats of regime change) when doing so was what the Israeli government wanted. The United States and Syria would not be allies if key groups in the lobby were less influential, but the United States would have taken a much less confrontational approach and might even be cooperating with Syria in a number of limited but useful ways. Indeed, absent the lobby, there might already be a peace treaty between Israel and Syria, and Damascus might not be backing Hezbollah in Lebanon, which would be good for both Washington and Jerusalem.
   In Chapter 10 ("Iran in the Crosshairs"), we trace the lobby's role in U.S. policy toward Iran. Washington and Tehran have had difficult relations since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah, and Israel has come to see Iran as its most serious adversary, in light of its nuclear ambitions and its support for groups like Hezbollah. Accordingly, Israel and the lobby have repeatedly pushed the United States to go after Iran and have acted to derail several
earlier opportunities for detente. The result, unfortunately, is that Iran's nuclear ambitions have increased and more extreme elements (such as current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) have come to power, making a difficult situation worse.
   Lebanon is the subject of Chapter 11 ("The Lobby and the Second Lebanon War"), and the pattern is much the same. We argue that Israel's response to Hezbollah's unjustified provocation in the summer of 2006 was both strategically foolish and morally wrong, yet the lobby's influence made it hard for U.S. officials to do anything except strongly back Israel. This case offers yet another classic illustration of the lobby's regrettable influence on American and Israeli interests: by making it hard for U.S. policy makers to step back and give their Israeli counterparts honest and critical advice, the lobby facilitated a policy that further tarnished America's image, weakened the democratically elected regime in Beirut, and strengthened Hezbollah.
   The final chapter ("What Is to Be Done?") explores how this unfortunate situation might be improved. We begin by identifying America's core Middle East interests and then sketch the essential principles of a strategy—which we term offshore balancing—that could defend these interests more effectively. We do not call for abandoning the U.S. commitment to Israel—indeed, we explicitly endorse coming to Israel's aid if its survival were ever in jeopardy. But we argue that it is time to treat Israel like a normal country and to make U.S. aid conditional on an end to the occupation and on Israel's willingness to conform its policies to American interests. Accomplishing this shift requires addressing the political power of the lobby and its current policy agenda, and we offer several suggestions for how the power of the lobby might be modified to make its influence more beneficial for the United States and Israel alike.

THOSE WE LEARNED FROM

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:35:02 GMT

THOSE WE LEARNED FROM

No author is an island, and we owe a considerable debt to other scholars and writers who examined these subjects before we did. To begin with, there is the extensive academic literature on interest groups that helped us understand how small but focused movements can exert influence far greater than their absolute numbers within the population might suggest.24 There is also a robust literature on the impact of ethnic groups on U.S. foreign policy, which confirms that the Israel lobby is not unique in its basic activities, only in its unusual level of influence.25
   A second body of literature addresses the lobby itself. A number of journalists, scholars, and former politicians have written about the lobby. Written from both critical and sympathetic perspectives, these works contain a considerable amount of useful information on the ways that the lobby has worked to influence U.S. foreign policy. We hope our account will extend the trail that these earlier writers blazed.26
   We have also learned a great deal from other studies, too numerous to list in toto, that deal with particular aspects of U.S. Middle East policy, U.S.-Israeli relations, or specific policy issues. Although some of these works— such as Steven Spiegel's The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan and Warren Bass's Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance— tend to downplay the lobby's influence, serious works of scholarship such as these nonetheless contain considerable evidence of the lobby's impact and especially its growing clout.27
   There is a final body of literature that has played an important role in helping us to think about Israel, the lobby, and America's relationship with the Jewish state. We refer to the so-called new history that has come out of Israel over the past twenty years. Using extensive archival research, Israeli scholars like Shlomo Ben-Ami, Simha Flapan, Baruch Kimmerling, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, and Zeev Sternhell have effectively overturned the conventional wisdom on Israel's founding and on its subsequent policies toward both the surrounding states and the Palestinians.28 Scholars from other countries have also contributed to setting the historical record straight.29 Together these individuals have undermined the original, highly romanticized version of the founding, in which the Jews are usually portrayed as the white hats and the Arabs as the black hats. Moreover, these works make clear that after Israel gained its independence, it behaved much more aggressively toward the Palestinians and other Arabs than is commonly recognized.
   There are various disputes among these historians, of course, and we do not agree with every point they make. Nevertheless, the story they collectively tell is not just a matter of academic interest. In fact, it has profound implications for how one thinks about the moral rationale for supporting Israel over the Palestinians. It also helps one understand why so many people in the Arab and Islamic world are deeply angry at the United States for supporting Israel so generously and unconditionally.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
A brief word about sources is in order before we proceed. Much of this study—especially Part II—deals with recent history, or with events whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain. Because official documents regarding contemporary events are normally unavailable to scholars, we have been forced to rely on other sources: newspapers, magazines, scholarly articles, books, reports from human rights organizations, radio and television transcripts, and personal interviews that we conducted. In a few instances, we had to work with an admittedly spotty record of events. Although we think it is unlikely, some parts of our story may look different once official records become available.
    In order to ensure that our various arguments are correct, we backed up virtually every significant point with multiple sources, which accounts for the extensive notes provided at the end of this book. We also relied heavily on Israeli sources like Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post, as well as the writings of Israeli scholars. Another indispensable source of information was American Jewish publications like the Forward and Jewish Week. Not only are these Israeli and Jewish-American sources filled with important information that is not found in the mainstream media in the United States, these newspapers were by and large not likely to be sympathetic to many of our arguments about the lobby. Our reliance on them should help make our conclusions even more reliable.

CONCLUSION

Our analysis begins by describing the material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel. The fact that America gives considerable support to the Jewish state is hardly headline news, but readers may be surprised to learn just how extensive and varied this largesse actually is. Documenting that support is the subject of the next chapter.
PART I

THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, AND THE LOBBY
THE GREAT BENEFACTOR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:31:26 GMT

THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, AND THE LOBBY
THE GREAT BENEFACTOR

"We are more than thankful to you." Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was uncharacteristically effusive when he appeared before a joint session of Congress on July 26, 1994. Extending his remarks to the "wonderful people of America," Rabin emphasized that "no words can express our gratitude . . . for your generous support, understanding, and cooperation, which are beyond compare in modern history." Two years later, following Rabin's tragic assassination, one of his successors, Benjamin Netanyahu, stood in the same spot and offered similar words of appreciation: "The United States has given Israel—how can I tell it to this body? The United States has given Israel, apart from political and military support, munificent and magnificent assistance in the economic sphere. With America's help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state." He told his audience, "I know that I speak for every Israeli and every Jew throughout the world when I say to you today, 'Thank you, people of America.'"1
These statements—and others like them—are not merely the gracious rhetoric that one typically hears from visiting foreign dignitaries. Rabin's and Netanyahu's words are an accurate description of the remarkable backing that the United States has long provided to the Jewish state. American taxpayers' money has subsidized Israel's economic development and rescued it during periods of financial crisis. American military assistance has strengthened Israel in wartime and helped preserve its military dominance in the Middle East. Washington has given Israel extensive diplomatic support in war and peace, and has helped insulate it from some of the adverse consequences of its own actions. U.S. aid has also been a key ingredient in the protracted Arab-Israeli peace process, with agreements such as the Camp
David Accords or the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan resting on explicit promises of increased American assistance. More than any other country, the United States has been Israel's great benefactor.

ECONOMIC AID

The most obvious indicator of Israel's favored position is the total amount of foreign aid it has received from America's taxpayers. As of 2005, direct U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel amounted to nearly $ 154 billion (in 2005 dollars), the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans.2 As discussed below, the actual total is significantly higher, because direct U.S. aid is given under unusually favorable terms and the United States provides Israel with other forms of material assistance that are not included in the foreign assistance budget.
   Because this level of support is rarely questioned today, it is easy to forget that the "special relationship" that now exists did not emerge until several decades after Israel's founding. Prior to World War II, American leaders occasionally offered rhetorical support for the Zionist goal of a Jewish homeland, but no president exerted much effort to advance that objective. President Harry S. Truman did play a key role in supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland when he decided to back the UN partition plan in 1947 and to recognize Israel immediately after its declaration of independence in May 1948. But both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations also realized that embracing Israel too closely would jeopardize relations with the Arab world and provide the Soviet Union with enticing opportunities to gain influence in the Middle East. Accordingly, the United States sought to steer a middle course between Israel and its Arab neighbors during the 1950s; economic aid to Israel was modest and the United States provided hardly any direct military assistance.3 Israeli requests to purchase American weaponry were politely rejected, as were requests for a U.S. security guarantee.4
   There were also several sharp diplomatic disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem during this period. When Israel ignored UN demands that it halt work on a canal to divert water from the Jordan River in September 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promptly announced that the United States was suspending foreign assistance. The threat worked: Israel agreed to stop the project on October 27 and U.S. aid was restored.5 Similar threats to halt American aid played a key role in convincing Israel to withdraw from the territory it had seized from Egypt in the 1956 Suez War.
Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion saw the war as an opportunity for territorial expansion, and he began the prewar discussions with Britain and France (the primary instigators of the attack on Egypt) by suggesting that Jordan be divided between Israel and Iraq and that Israel be given portions of Lebanon and control over the Straits of Tiran.6 Britain and France were preoccupied with Egypt and uninterested in this grand scheme. But Ben-Gurion made several statements following the conquest by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of the Sinai Peninsula (including a speech in the Knesset on November 7) suggesting that the 1949 armistice agreements were void and that Israel intended to keep the lands it had just seized. When Eisenhower threatened to block all public and private aid to Israel, Ben-Gurion quickly backtracked, agreeing "in principle" to withdraw in exchange for adequate assurances of Israel's security. Israel then worked to rally support in the United States, a campaign that reduced Eisenhower's congressional support and led him to make a nationally televised speech justifying his actions. Israel finally withdrew from all the territories it had conquered in the spring of 1957, in exchange for assurances regarding border security in Gaza and freedom of navigation in the Straits of Tiran.7
   U.S.-Israeli relations had warmed by the late 1950s, but it was the Kennedy administration that made the first tangible U.S. commitment to Israel's military security.8 In December 1962, in fact, Kennedy told Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir that the United States "has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs," adding that "I think it is quite clear that in case of an invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel. We have that capacity and it is growing."9 Kennedy soon thereafter authorized the first major sale of U.S. weaponry—Hawk antiaircraft missiles—to Israel in 1963. This shift reflected a number of strategic considerations—such as the desire to balance Soviet arms sales to Egypt, dampen Israel's nuclear ambitions, and encourage Israel's leaders to respond favorably to U.S. peace initiatives—but skillful Israeli diplomacy, the influence of several pro-Israel advisers, and Kennedy's understandable desire to maintain support from Jewish voters and donors played a role in his decision as well.10 The Hawk sale opened the door to several additional weapons deals, most notably the sale of more than two hundred M48A battle tanks in 1964. In an attempt to disguise American involvement and thereby limit repercussions in the Arab world, the tanks were shipped to Israel by West Germany, which in turn received replacements from the United States.11
In terms of the absolute amount of U.S. aid, however, the real sea change
took place following the Six-Day War in June 1967. After averaging roughly $63 million annually from 1949 to 1965 (more than 95 percent of which was economic assistance and food aid), average aid increased to $102 million per year from 1966 to 1970. Support soared to $634.5 million in 1971 (roughly 85 percent was military assistance) and more than quintupled after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Israel became the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in 1976, a position it has retained ever since. Support for Israel shifted from loans to direct grants during this period, with the bulk of U.S. aid consisting of military assistance rather than economic or technical support. According to Clyde Mark of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the official research arm of the U.S. Congress, "Israel preferred that the aid be in the form of loans, rather than grants, to avoid having a U.S. military contingent in Israel to oversee a grant program. Since 1974, some or all of U.S. military aid to Israel has been in the form of loans for which repayment is waived. Technically, the assistance is called loans, but as a practical matter, the military aid is grant."12
   Israel now receives on average about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, an amount that is roughly one-sixth of America's direct foreign assistance budget and equal to about 2 percent of Israel's GDR In recent years, about 75 percent of U.S. assistance has been military aid, with the remainder broken down into various forms of economic aid.13 In per capita terms, this level of direct foreign assistance amounts to a direct subsidy of more than $500 per year for each Israeli. By comparison, the number two recipient of American foreign aid, Egypt, receives only $20 per person, and impoverished countries such as Pakistan and Haiti receive roughly $5 per person and $27 per person, respectively.14 Jerusalem and Washington agreed to gradually phase out economic assistance beginning in 1997, and Congress has reduced economic aid to Israel by $ 120 million per year since FY1999. This step has been partly compensated for by a parallel U.S. commitment to increase its military aid by $60 million per year, and by congressional willingness to vote supplemental aid packages, such as the $1.2 billion provided to support implementation of the 1998 Wye Agreement (in which Israel agreed to withdraw forces from parts of the West Bank) and an additional $1 billion in foreign military financing (FMF) aid in 2003 to help Israel prepare for the war with Iraq.15
   Three billion dollars per year is generous, but it is hardly the whole story. As noted above, the canonical $3 billion figure omits a substantial number of other benefits and thus significantly understates the actual level of U.S. support. Indeed, in 1991, Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN) told re
porters that Israel was one of three countries whose aid "substantially exceeds the popularly quoted figures" and said the annual figure was in fact more than $4.3 billion.16
   The discrepancy arises in part because Israel gets its aid under more favorable terms than most other recipients of U.S. assistance.17 Most recipients of American foreign aid get their money in quarterly installments, but since 1982, the annual foreign aid bill has included a special clause specifying that Israel is to receive its entire annual appropriation in the first thirty days of the fiscal year.18 This is akin to receiving your entire annual salary on January 1 and thus being able to earn interest on the unspent portion until you used it.
   Because the U.S. government normally runs budget deficits, transferring the aid all at once requires it to borrow the necessary amount of money up front, and the CRS estimates that it costs U.S. taxpayers "between $50 and $60 million per year to borrow funds for the early, lump-sum payment."19 Moreover, the U.S. government ends up paying Israel additional interest when Israel reinvests the unspent portion in U.S. treasury bills. According to the U.S. embassy in Israel, early transfer of FMF funds has enabled Israel to earn some $660 million in extra interest as of 2004.20 Israel has also received "excess defense articles" (surplus U.S. military equipment provided to friendly nations either free of charge or heavily discounted) beyond the normal limits imposed by the 1976 Arms Export Control Act. This limit was originally set at $250 million (excluding ships), but the appropriations bill of November 5, 1990, authorized a "one-time only" transfer to Israel of $700 million worth of surplus U.S. equipment in 1991.21
   Likewise, the FMF program normally requires recipients of U.S. military assistance to spend all of the money here in the United States, to help keep American defense workers employed. Congress grants Israel a special exemption in the annual appropriations bill, however, authorizing it to use about one out of every four U.S. military aid dollars to subsidize its own defense industry. "No other recipient of U.S. military assistance has been granted this benefit," notes a recent CRS report, and "the proceeds to Israeli defense firms from purchases with U.S. funds have allowed the Israeli defense industry to achieve necessary economies of scale and become highly sophisticated." By 2004, in fact, Israel, a comparatively small country, had become the world's eighth largest arms supplier.22
   Along with Egypt and Turkey, Israel is also permitted to apply its entire FMF funding to meet its current year obligations, rather than having to set aside portions to cover expected costs in subsequent years. According to the
U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), this "cash flow" method of financing "permits a country to order more defense goods and services than it normally could because less money must be reserved when a contract is signed."23 Israel can make its payments as long as the United States continues to provide similar amounts of aid, a situation that makes it harder for the United States to reduce its support in the future. And in a further manipulation of the methods of financing, recipients of U.S. aid are normally expected to draw down FMF loans and grants at an equal rate, but Israel is allowed to draw down the grant (or waived) portions of its FMF allocation before it uses any loaned portions. By delaying the date on which the loan is activated, this procedure reduces the amount of interest that Israel owes Uncle Sam.24
   Remarkably, Israel is the only recipient of U.S. economic aid that does not have to account for how it is spent. Aid to other countries is allocated for specific development projects (HIV/AIDS prevention, counternarcotics programs, children's health, democracy promotion, improving education, etc.), but Israel receives a direct lump-sum cash transfer.25 This exemption makes it virtually impossible for the United States to prevent its subsidies from being used for purposes that it opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. According to the CRS's Clyde Mark, "Because U.S. economic aid is given to Israel as direct government-to-government budgetary authority without any specific project accounting, and money is fungible, there is no way to tell how Israel uses U.S. aid."26
   Another form of U.S. support is loan guarantees that permit Israel to borrow money from commercial banks at lower rates, thereby saving millions of dollars in interest payments. Israel requested and received approximately $ 10 billion in loan guarantees from the United States in the early 1990s in order to finance the costs of settling Soviet Jews immigrating to Israel. The U.S. government does not provide funds directly in a loan guarantee—it merely undertakes to reimburse private lenders in the event of a default— and advocates of these measures often claim that there is no real expenditure and thus no real cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Loan guarantees do have budgetary consequences, however, because Congress must appropriate funds to cover an estimate of what could be lost over the life of the loan based on its net present value. Estimates for the cost of the 1992 loan guarantee range from $100 million to $800 million.27
   Washington authorized a second round of loan guarantees in 2003, totaling nearly $9 billion,

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:30:31 GMT

Washington authorized a second round of loan guarantees in 2003, totaling nearly $9 billion, to help Israel prepare for the war with Iraq, deal with a protracted economic crisis, and cover the costs imposed by the Second
Palestinian Intifada. Because Israel is legally barred from using U.S. economic aid in the Occupied Territories, the actual amount allocated was eventually reduced by an amount equivalent to Israel's estimated expenditures on settlement construction. This reduction is not as severe as it may sound, however, as it involved no decrease in direct U.S. aid and merely forced Israel to pay a slightly higher interest rate on a small portion of the borrowed funds.
   In addition to government subsidized aid and loan guarantees, Israel receives an estimated $2 billion annually in private donations from American citizens, roughly half in direct payments and half via the purchase of State of Israel Bonds.28 These bonds receive favorable treatment in U.S. law; although the interest paid on them is not tax-exempt, Congress specifically exempted them from the provisions of the 1984 Deficit Reduction Act, which imposed additional tax penalties on other bonds with yields below the federal rate.29 Similarly, private donations to charities in most foreign countries are not tax deductible, but many private donations to Israel are, due to a special clause in the U.S.-Israel income tax treaty.30
   This flow of money to Israel has been a crucial boon to the general economy, but private contributions from U.S. citizens have also played an important strategic role, going back to the preindependence era.31 In his memoirs, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres revealed that private contributions from wealthy diaspora Jews (including several Americans) had helped finance Israel's clandestine nuclear program in the 1950s and 1960s. According to the Israeli journalist Michael Karpin, a key coordinator of this fund-raising effort was Abraham Feinberg, a well-connected U.S. businessman, philanthropist, and political adviser, and contributors to the campaign reportedly included Canadian beverage magnate Samuel Bronfman and several members of the Rothschild family. Feinberg never divulged the names of the American donors, however, and his own role has never been officially confirmed.32 Today, groups like the Friends of Israel Defense Forces raise funds in the United States to "support social, educational, cultural and recreational programs and facilities for the young men and women soldiers of Israel who defend the Jewish homeland." One recent dinner in New York reportedly raised some $18 million in contributions, which are tax deductible under U.S. law.33
   Other private donations from U.S. citizens have also helped subsidize Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the Occupied Territories. These contributions to settlements in the West Bank (including those made via U.S. charities or other "Friends of . . ." organizations) are not supposed to be tax
exempt in the United States, but such restrictions are inherently difficult to enforce and were loosely monitored in the past.34 For example, in order to safeguard the tax-exempt status of U.S. donations to the Jewish Agency for Israel (a quasi-governmental organization that helps settle new arrivals in Israel), the task of aiding settlements in the Occupied Territories was taken out of the agency's Settlement Department and assigned to a new "Settlement Division" within the World Zionist Organization (WZO). But as Ger-shom Gorenberg points out, "The Division was a shell that contracted all services from the Jewish Agency . . . The change kept the U.S. Jewish philanthropies clear of the occupied territories. On the ground, the same people continued the same efforts."35 This problem was underscored when an official Israeli government study directed by Talia Sasson, former chief criminal prosecutor, revealed that the Settlement Division of the WZO (which receives support from prominent Jewish organizations all over the world) was actively involved in the creation of unauthorized settlements in the Occupied Territories.36 More broadly, because Israeli charities operate beyond the reach of U.S. tax authorities, donations from Jewish and Christian evangelical organizations are hard to monitor once they are transferred to Israel. In practice, therefore, the U.S. government cannot easily determine the extent to which tax-exempt private donations are being diverted for unauthorized purposes.37
   All this largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is not a poor or devastated country like Afghanistan, Niger, Burma, or Sierra Leone. On the contrary, Israel is now a modern industrial power. Its per capita income in 2006 was twenty-ninth in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund, and is nearly double that of Hungary and the Czech Republic, substantially higher than Portugal's, South Korea's, or Taiwan's, and far outstrips every country in Latin America and Africa.38 It ranks twenty-third in the United Nations' 2006 Human Development Report and thirty-eighth in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2005 "quality of life" rankings.39 Yet this comparatively prosperous state is America's biggest aid recipient, each year receiving sums that dwarf U.S. support for impoverished states such as Bangladesh, Bolivia, and Liberia. This anomaly is even acknowledged by some of Israel's more fervent supporters in the United States. In 1997, for example, Mitchell Bard, the former editor of AIPAC's Near East Report, and Daniel Pipes, the hawkish founder of the pro-Israel Middle East Forum, wrote that "Israel has become an affluent country with a personal income rivaling Great Britain's, so the American willingness to provide aid to Israel is no longer based purely on need."40
   The United States has taken on other economic burdens for Israel's benefit, often as part of efforts to persuade Israel to accept or implement peace agreements with its neighbors. As part of the 1975 disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel, for example, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that committed the United States to guarantee Israel's oil needs in the event of a crisis and to finance and stock "a supplementary strategic reserve" for Israel, at an estimated cost of several hundred million dollars.41 The oil guarantee was reaffirmed during the final peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel in March 1979 and has been quietly renewed ever since.42
   Finally, the aid that the United States provides to several of Israel's neighbors is at least partly intended to benefit Israel as well. Egypt and Jordan are the number two and three recipients of U.S. foreign aid, but most of this money should be seen as a reward for good behavior—specifically, their willingness to sign peace treaties with Israel. Egypt received $71.7 million in U.S. aid in 1974, but it got $1,127 billion in 1975 and $1,320 billion in 1976 (in constant 2005 dollars) following completion of the Sinai II disengagement agreement. U.S. aid to Egypt reached $2.3 billion in 1978 and soared to a whopping $5.9 billion in 1979, the year the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty was signed. Cairo still gets about $2 billion annually.43 Similarly, Jordan received $76 million in direct aid in 1994 and only $57 million in 1995, but Congress rewarded King Hussein's decision to sign a peace treaty in 1994 by forgiving Jordan's $700 million debt to the United States and removing other restrictions on U.S. aid. Since 1997, U.S. aid to Jordan has averaged roughly $566 million annually.44 U.S. willingness to reward Egypt and Jordan in this way is yet another manifestation of Washington's generosity toward the Jewish state.

MILITARY ASSISTANCE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:29:34 GMT

MILITARY ASSISTANCE

These various forms of economic assistance have been and remain important to Israel, but the bulk of U.S. support is now committed to preserving Israel's military supremacy in the Middle East.45 Not only does Israel receive access to top-drawer U.S. weaponry (F-15 and F-16 aircraft, Blackhawk helicopters, cluster munitions, "smart bombs," etc.), it has also become linked to the U.S. defense and intelligence establishments through a diverse array of formal agreements and informal links. According to the Congressional Research
Service, "U.S. military aid has helped transform Israel's armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world."46
   Moreover, according to the Wall Street Journal, Israel "enjoys unusually wide latitude in spending the [military assistance] funds."47 The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) handles almost all the purchasing and monitors U.S. aid for all other military aid recipients, but Israel deals directly with military contractors for virtually all of its purchases and then gets reimbursed from its aid account.48 Israel is also the only country where contracts for less than $500,000 are exempt from prior U.S. review.49
   The potential risks inherent in these comparatively lax oversight arrangements were revealed in the early 1990s, when the head of Israeli Air Force procurement, Brigadier General Rami Dotan, was found to have embezzled and illegally diverted millions of dollars of U.S. aid. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dotan (who eventually pleaded guilty in Israel and received a lengthy jail sentence) reportedly "parceled out work orders to stay under the $500,000 threshold." Nonetheless, the head of DSCA's predecessor, the Defense Security Assistance Agency, Lieutenant General Teddy Allen, subsequently told a congressional subcommittee that the Department of Defense inspector general's recommendation that the aid program for Israel be "revamped" had been rejected because it might cause "turbulence in our relations" with Israel.50
   In addition to the economic and military aid already described, the United States has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons like the Lavi aircraft, the Merkava tank, and the Arrow missile.51 These projects were funded through the U.S. Department of Defense and often portrayed as joint research and development efforts, but the United States did not need these weapons and never intended to purchase them for its own use. The Lavi project was eventually canceled on cost-effectiveness grounds (with much of the cancellation cost being borne by the United States), but the other weapons went into Israel's arsenal at Uncle Sam's expense.52 The FY2004 U.S. defense budget included a $136 million request for the Arrow, for example, with $66 million allocated for additional improvements to the system and $70 million authorized for the production of additional units. Thus, the money that Washington pays to help Israel's defense industry develop or produce these "joint weapons projects" is in reality another form of subsidy.53 The United States sometimes benefits from the technology that Israeli firms develop, but America would benefit even more if these funds were used to support high-tech industries in the United States.
Military ties between the United States and Israel were upgraded in the
1980s, as part of the Reagan administration's effort to build an anti-Soviet "strategic consensus" in the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon signed a memorandum of understanding in 1981 establishing a "framework for continued consultation and cooperation to enhance their national security."54 This agreement led to the creation of a Joint Security Assistance Planning Group (JSAP) and Joint Political Military Group, which meet regularly to review Israel's aid requests and to coordinate military plans, joint exercises, and logistical arrangements. Although Israeli leaders had hoped for a formal treaty of alliance and were disappointed by the limited nature of the framework agreement, it was a more formal expression of a U.S. commitment than earlier presidential statements, such as Kennedy's private remarks to Golda Meirin 1962.
   Despite tensions over a wide array of issues—U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor, Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights in December 1981, its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and its abrupt rejection of the "Reagan Plan" for peace in September 1982—security cooperation between Israel and the United States increased steadily in the Reagan years. Joint military exercises began in 1984, and in 1986 Israel became one of three foreign countries invited to participate in the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars"). Finally, in 1988, a new memorandum of agreement reaffirmed the "close partnership between Israel and the United States" and designated Israel a "Major Non-NATO Ally," along with Australia, Egypt, Japan, and South Korea. States enjoying this status are eligible to purchase a wider array of U.S. weapons at lower prices, get priority delivery on war surplus materiel, and participate in joint research and development projects and U.S. counterterrorism initiatives. Commercial firms from these states also get preferential treatment when bidding for U.S. defense contracts.55
   Security links between the two countries have expanded ever since. The United States began prepositioning military supplies in Israel in 1989, and Congress voted in 2006 to increase the stockpile from roughly $ 100 million to $400 million by 2008.56 This policy has been justified as a way to enhance the Pentagon's ability to respond quickly to a regional crisis, but prepositioning U.S. supplies in Israel is actually an inefficient way to prepare for this contingency and the Pentagon has never been enthusiastic about this policy. According to Shai Feldman, former head of Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Institute of Strategic Studies, "Present arrangements permit the storage only of materiel that could also be used in an emergency by Israeli forces. In the
view of Pentagon planners, this implies that the United States cannot be absolutely certain that arms and ammunition stored in Israel would be available in a crisis situation. Moreover, this 'dual use' arrangement means that instead of storing weapons and ordnance for pre-designated U.S. units, weapons would have to be distributed from general stocks under crisis conditions and then integrated into different combat units, creating a logistical nightmare."57 The real purpose of the stockpile program is to enhance Israel's materiel reserves, and it is hardly surprising that Ynetnews, a Web news service affiliated with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, reported in December 2006 that "a great portion of the American equipment stored in Israel . . . was used for combat in the summer [2006] war in Lebanon."58
   Building on the other working groups created during the 1980s, the United States and Israel established a Joint Anti-Terrorism Working Group in 1996 and set up an electronic "hotline" between the Pentagon and Israel's Ministry of Defense. Further cementing the links between the two states, Israel was given access to the U.S. satellite-based missile warning system in 1997. Then, in 2001, the two states established an annual "interagency strategic dialogue" to discuss "long-term issues." The latter forum was temporarily suspended during a dispute over Israeli sales of American military technology to China, but it reconvened in November 2005.59
   As one would expect, U.S.-Israeli security cooperation also extends to the realm of intelligence. Cooperation between U.S. and Israeli intelligence services dates back to the late 1950s, and by 1985 the two countries had reportedly signed some two dozen intelligence-sharing arrangements. Israel gave the United States access to captured Soviet weaponry and to reports from emigres from the Soviet bloc, while the United States provided Israel with satellite imagery during the 1973 October War and prior to the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue, and reportedly helped finance several Israeli intelligence operations in Africa.60 In the early 1980s, the United States even gave Israel access to certain forms of intelligence that it denied its closest NATO allies. In particular, Israel reportedly received almost unlimited access to intelligence from the sophisticated KH-11 reconnaissance satellite ("not only the information, but the photos themselves," according to the head of Israeli military intelligence), while British access to the same source was much more limited.61 Access to this data was restricted following Israel's raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, but the first President Bush is believed to have authorized the transfer of real-time satellite information about Iraq's Scud attacks during the 1991 Gulf War.62
In contrast to Washington's long-standing opposition to the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, the United States has tacitly supported Israel's effort to maintain regional military superiority by turning a blind eye toward its various clandestine WMD programs, including its possession of upward of two hundred nuclear weapons.63 The U.S. government has pressed dozens of states to sign the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but American leaders did little to pressure Israel to halt its nuclear program and sign the agreement. The Kennedy administration clearly wanted to restrain Israel's nuclear ambitions in the early 1960s, and it eventually persuaded Israel to permit U.S. scientists to tour Israel's nuclear research facility at Dimona to ascertain whether Israel was trying to produce a nuclear bomb. The Israeli government repeatedly denied that it had a weapons program, dragged its feet in scheduling visits, and imposed onerous restrictions on the inspectors' access when visits did occur. Thus, the first U.S. visit, on May 18, 1961, involved just two American scientists and lasted only four days, only one of them spent at the Dimona site. According to Warren Bass, "Israel's strategy was to permit a visit . . . but ensure that the inspectors did not find anything." Pressed to allow a follow-up visit a year later, the Israelis unexpectedly invited U.S. Atomic Energy Commission officials inspecting a different Israeli facility to make an impromptu tour of Dimona. As Bass notes, this visit "hardly merits the name 'inspection,'" but the Kennedy administration "did not seem eager to pick a fight."64
   Kennedy stepped up the pressure the following year, however, sending both Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, several stern letters demanding biannual inspections "in accord with international standards" and warning that "this Government's commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized" if the United States were unable to resolve its concerns about Israel's nuclear ambitions.65 Kennedy's threats convinced Israel's leaders to permit additional visits, but the concession did not lead to compliance. As Eshkol reportedly told his colleagues after receiving Kennedy's July 1963 demarche: "What am I frightened of? His man will come, and he will actually be told that he can visit [the Dimona site] and go anywhere he wishes, but when he wants a door opened at some place or another then [Emanuel] Prat [head of construction at Dimona] will tell him 'Not that.'"66 On other visits, inspectors were not permitted to bring in outside instruments or take samples.
   As the more recent cases of Iraq and North Korea remind us, such ob-fuscatory tactics are part of the standard playbook for all clandestine prolif-erators. U.S. officials remained suspicious about Jerusalem's nuclear plans, but Israel's deception worked because neither Kennedy nor his successor,
Lyndon Johnson, was willing to withhold U.S. support if Israel were not more forthcoming. As a result, notes Avner Cohen in his detailed history of Israel's nuclear program, "the Israelis were able to determine the rules of the [U.S.] visits and the Johnson administration chose not to confront Israel on the issue, fearing that Israel would end the arrangement . . . Kennedy threatened both Ben Gurion and [Levi] Eshkol that noncompliance . . . could jeopardize American commitment to Israel's security and well being,' but Johnson was unwilling to risk an American-Israeli crisis over the issue."67 "Instead of inspections every six months," writes Bass, "in practice Johnson settled for a quick visit once a year or so."68 And when CIA Director Richard Helms came to the White House in 1968 to inform Johnson that U.S. intelligence had concluded that Israel had in fact acquired a nuclear capability, Johnson told him to make sure that nobody else was shown the evidence, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. According to the journalist Seymour Hersh, "Johnson's purpose in chasing Helms—and his intelligence—away was clear: he did not want to know what the CIA was trying to tell him, for once he accepted that information, he would have to act on it. By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb."69
   In addition to its nuclear arsenal, Israel maintains active chemical and biological weapons programs and has yet to ratify either the Chemical or Biological Weapons Convention.70 The irony is hard to miss: the United States has pressured many other states to join the NPT, imposed sanctions on countries that have defied U.S. wishes and acquired nuclear weapons anyway, gone to war in 2003 to prevent Iraq from pursuing WMD, and contemplated attacking Iran and North Korea for the same reason. Yet Washington has long subsidized an ally whose clandestine WMD activities are well-known and whose nuclear arsenal has given several of its neighbors a powerful incentive to seek WMD themselves.
   With the partial exception of Soviet support for Cuba, it is hard to think of another instance where one country has provided another with a similar level of material aid over such an extended period.71 America's willingness to provide some support to Israel is not surprising, of course, because U.S. leaders have long favored Israel's existence and understood that it faced a hostile threat environment. As discussed below and in Chapter 2, U.S. leaders also saw aid to Israel as a way to advance broader foreign policy goals. Nonetheless, the sheer magnitude of U.S. aid is remarkable. As we show in Chapter 3, Israel was stronger than its neighbors before significant American military aid commenced, and it is now a prosperous country. U.S. aid
has undoubtedly been useful for Israel, but it may not have been essential to its survival.
   The most singular feature of U.S. support for Israel is its increasingly unconditional nature.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:28:44 GMT

The most singular feature of U.S. support for Israel is its increasingly unconditional nature. President Eisenhower could credibly threaten to withhold aid after the Suez War (though even he faced significant congressional opposition when he did), but those days are long past. Since the mid-1960s, Israel has continued receiving generous support even when it took actions American leaders thought were unwise and contrary to U.S. interests. Israel gets its aid despite its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its various WMD programs. It gets its aid when it builds settlements in the Occupied Territories (losing only a small amount through reductions in loan guarantees), even though the U.S. government opposes this policy. It also gets its aid when it annexes territory it has conquered (as it did on the Golan Heights and in Jerusalem), sells U.S. military technology to potential enemies like China, conducts espionage operations on U.S. soil, or uses U.S. weapons in ways that violate U.S. law (such as the use of cluster munitions in civilian areas in Lebanon). It gets additional aid when it makes concessions for peace, but it rarely loses American support when it takes actions that make peace more elusive. And it gets its aid even when Israeli leaders renege on pledges made to U.S. presidents. Menachem Begin promised Ronald Reagan that he would not lobby against the proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, for example, but Begin then went up to Capitol Hill and told a Senate panel that he opposed the deal.72
   One might think that U.S. generosity would give Washington considerable leverage over Israel's conduct, but this has not been the case. When dealing with Israel, in fact, U.S. leaders can usually elicit cooperation only by offering additional carrots (increased assistance) rather than employing sticks (threats to withhold aid). For example, the Israeli Cabinet agreed to publicly endorse UN Resolution 242—which, originally passed in November 1967, called for Israel's withdrawal from territories seized in the Six-Day War—only after President Richard Nixon gave private assurances that Israel would receive additional U.S. aircraft.73 Moreover, its acceptance of the cease-fire agreement that ended the so-called War of Attrition with Egypt (a protracted series of air, artillery, and infantry clashes that began along the Suez Canal in March 1969 and continued until July 1970) was bought by a U.S. pledge to accelerate aircraft deliveries to Israel, to provide advanced electronic countermeasures against Egypt's Soviet-supplied antiaircraft missiles, and, more generally, to "maintain the balance of power."74 According to Shimon Peres (who served as Minister without Portfolio during this period), "As to the question of U.S. pressure on
us to accept their programme, I would say they handled us more with a carrot than with a stick; in any event they never threatened us with sanctions."75
   This pattern continued through the 1970s, with Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter pledging ever-larger sums of aid in the course of the disengagement talks with Egypt and during the negotiations that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Specifically, U.S. aid to Israel increased from $1.9 billion in 1975 to $6.29 billion in 1976 (following completion of the Sinai II agreement) and from $4.4 billion in 1978 to $10.9 billion in 1979 (following the final peace treaty with Egypt).76 As discussed below, the United States also made a number of other commitments to Israel in order to persuade it to sign. In much the same way, the Clinton administration gave Israel increased assistance as part of the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, and Clinton's efforts to advance the Oslo peace process led him to pledge an additional $1.2 billion in military aid to Israel to win Israel's acceptance of the 1998 Wye Agreement. Prime Minister Netanyahu suspended the Wye Agreement shortly after it was signed, however, following a violent confrontation between a Palestinian crowd and two Israeli citizens.77 According to U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross, "It was hard to escape the conclusion that Bibi [Netanyahu] . . . was seizing on this incident to avoid further implementation. This was unfortunate, because the Palestinians were working diligently to carry out most of their commitments under Wye, particularly in the area of making arrests and fighting terror."78 Yet as the Israeli scholar Abraham Ben-Zvi observes, "The Clinton administration's frustration with Netanyahu's style was rarely translated into policy that harmed the American-Israeli special relationship."79
   Indeed, attempts to use America's potential leverage face significant obstacles and are rarely attempted, even when U.S. officials are deeply upset by Israeli actions. When President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger grew impatient with Israeli intransigence during the disengagement negotiations with Egypt in 1975, a threat to curtail aid and conduct a far-reaching reassessment of U.S. policy was derailed when seventy-six senators signed a letter sponsored by AIPAC demanding that Ford remain "responsive" to Israel's economic and military needs. With their ability to reduce U.S. aid effectively blocked, Ford and Kissinger had little choice but to resume "step-by-step" diplomacy and try to gain Israeli concessions by offering additional inducements.80
   President Jimmy Carter was similarly upset by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begins failure to implement the full terms of the 1978 Camp David Accords (the breakthrough agreement that created the framework for
the subsequent peace treaty between Egypt and Israel), but he never tried to link U.S. assistance to Israeli compliance.81 Clinton administration officials were equally frustrated when Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Barak did not live up to all of Israel's commitments in the Oslo agreements, and Clinton was reportedly "furious" when Barak reneged on a commitment to transfer three Jerusalem villages to Palestinian control, declaring that Barak was making him a "false prophet" in the eyes of another foreign leader, Yasser Arafat. Clinton also erupted when Barak tried to shift ground during the 2000 Camp David Summit, telling him, "I can't go see Arafat with a retrenchment! You can sell it; there is no way I can. This is not real. This is not serious."82 Yet Clinton did not react to these maneuvers by threatening to withhold support.
   To be sure, America has occasionally withheld aid temporarily in order to express displeasure over particular Israeli actions, but such gestures are usually symbolic and short-lived, and have little lasting effect on Israeli conduct. In 1977, for example, Israel used U.S. armored personnel carriers to intervene in southern Lebanon (a step that violated both the Arms Export Control Act requirement that U.S. arms be used only for "legitimate self defense" and Prime Minister Menachem Begin's pledge to take no action in Lebanon without first consulting Washington) and then denied having done so. After sophisticated intelligence information exposed Israel's deception, the Carter administration threatened to terminate future military shipments and Begin ordered that the equipment be withdrawn.83
   A similar example is the Reagan administration's decision to suspend the 1981 memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation following Israel's de facto annexation of the Golan Heights, but Reagan later implemented the key provisions of the agreement even though Israel never reversed the annexation. The United States also halted shipments of cluster munitions after Israel violated prior agreements regarding their use during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but began supplying them again in 1988.84 U.S. pressure also helped persuade Israel not to conduct a full-fledged assault on the PLO forces that had taken refuge in Beirut after Israel's 1982 invasion, but Israel's leaders were themselves reluctant to take this step and thus did not need much convincing.85
   In 1991, the first Bush administration pressured the Shamir government to stop building settlements and to attend a planned peace conference by withholding the $10 billion loan guarantee, but the suspension lasted only a few months and the guarantees were approved once Yitzhak Rabin replaced Shamir as prime minister.86 Israel agreed to halt construction of new settlements but continued to expand the existing blocs, and the number of set
tiers in the Occupied Territories increased by 8,000 (14.7 percent) in 1991, by 6,900 (10.3 percent) in 1993, by 6,900 (9.7 percent) in 1994, and by 7,300 (9.1 percent) in 1996, rates significantly higher than Israel's overall population growth during these years.87
   A similar episode occurred in 2003, when the second Bush administration tried to signal its opposition to Israel's "security wall" in the West Bank by making a token reduction in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel. Withholding the entire guarantee or reducing direct foreign aid might have had an effect, but Bush merely withheld a portion of the loan guarantee equivalent to the estimated costs of those portions of the wall that were encroaching on Palestinian lands. Israel simply had to pay a higher interest rate on a small portion of its loan, a penalty amounting to a few million dollars. When compared to the billions of dollars of U.S. aid that Israel already gets (and expects to get in the future), this was barely a slap on the wrist. It had no discernible effect on Israel's behavior.

DIPLOMATIC PROTECTION AND WARTIME SUPPORT

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:27:25 GMT

DIPLOMATIC PROTECTION AND WARTIME SUPPORT

In addition to these tangible forms of economic and military aid, the United States provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Between 1972 and 2006, Washington vetoed forty-two UN Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel. That number is greater than the combined total of all the vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members for the same period and amounts to slightly more than half of all American vetoes during these years.88 There were also numerous resolutions focusing on Israel that never reached a vote in the Security Council due to the threat of an American veto. In 2002, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte reportedly told a closed meeting of the Security Council that the United States would henceforth veto any resolutions condemning Israel that did not simultaneously condemn terrorism in general and specifically mention Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade by name.89 The United States has voted to censure Israel on a few occasions, but only after particularly egregious Israeli actions, when the resolution in question offered only mild criticisms, or when Washington wanted to communicate a degree of displeasure with Israeli intransigence.90
   Outside the Security Council, the United States routinely backs Israel whenever the UN General Assembly passes one of the many resolutions condemning Israeli behavior or calling for action on behalf of the Palestini
ans. Although these resolutions are nonbinding and largely symbolic, Washington's stance often puts it at odds with most of its allies and in the company of a tiny handful of other states. To take a typical example, UN General Assembly Resolution 59/124, on "Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People," passed by a vote of 149-7 (with 22 abstaining and 13 nonvoting) on December 10, 2004. Among the many nations supporting the resolution were Japan, Germany, France, China, and Great Britain. The six countries that joined with the United States to oppose the resolution were Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau.91
   Similarly, when Arab countries have tried to raise the issue of Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal within the International Atomic Energy Agency, Washington has stepped in to prevent the organization from placing the matter on its agenda. As Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled told the Jewish newspaper Forward in 2003, "The Arabs do this every year, but in order to have a comprehensive debate amid a consensus on a resolution against Israel, you need the okay of the board of governors [of the IAEA] and you don't have it" due to Washington's influence on the board.92
   America's willingness to take Israel's side in diplomacy and war has increased significantly over time. During the 1950s, as previously noted, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from the territory it had seized during the Suez War, and they successfully halted unilateral Israeli attempts to divert key water resources. Since the early 1960s, however, the United States has become more committed to protecting Israel's interests during major confrontations and in the subsequent negotiations. Washington has not given Jerusalem everything it wanted, but U.S. support has been consistent and considerable.
   When an escalating series of clashes between Israel and Syria in 1966-67 led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to order troops back into the Sinai in May, alarming Israel's leaders and raising the danger of a wider war, the Johnson administration was nonetheless convinced that Israel was militarily superior to its Arab adversaries and exaggerating the danger of an Arab attack.93 General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Johnson, "Our best estimate was that if there were a war, that the Israelis would win it in five to seven days," and Johnson himself told Israel Foreign Minister Abba Eban that if Egypt attacked, "you will whip hell out of them."94 Key Israeli leaders privately agreed with this assessment but continued to send Washington alarming reports as part of a deliberate campaign to elicit sympathy and support.95
   Based on its own appraisals, the United States tried to prevent the outbreak of war by convincing the Israeli government to refrain from using force and to pursue a diplomatic solution.96 President Johnson called Egypt's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping on May 26 "illegal" and was sympathetic to Israel's concerns, but he did not want to commit U.S. forces in light of American involvement in Vietnam and refused to make a blanket pledge to come to Israel's aid. His efforts to restrain Israel gradually softened, however, and by the first week of June, Johnson and several of his advisers were hinting to Israeli officials that the United States would not object if Israel acted, cautioning that they should not expect U.S. help if things went badly. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a journalist that "I don't think it is our business to restrain anyone," and Michael Brecher reports that by June 3, "the perceived [Israeli] impression was that, if Israel took the initiative . . . the United States would not take an unfriendly view." In effect, Johnson gave the Israelis what one expert later called a "yellow light" for an attack.97 The reasons for Johnson's shift remain obscure, although pressure from several pro-Israel friends and advisers, a letter-writing campaign organized by the Israeli embassy, and the growing sense that Israel was going to strike anyway may all have played a role.98
   The United States did not put significant pressure on Israel to halt the fighting until it had emerged victorious and did not criticize Israel's action after the war. Indeed, when the Soviet Union threatened to intervene following Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights (which threatened Syria, the Soviets' ally), the president ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet to move closer to Israel in order to deter Soviet interference. In sharp contrast with the 1956 Suez War, the Johnson administration made it clear there would be no American pressure for an Israeli withdrawal except in the context of a broader peace agreement.99 Nor did the United States insist on a full and complete accounting of the tragic attack on the reconnaissance ship USS Liberty by Israeli naval and air forces on June 8, an event whose origins remain contested.100 The United States may not have given Israel the diplomatic and military protection it originally sought at the onset of the crisis, but there was no doubt where America's sympathies lay.
   The United States tilted even more strongly toward Israel during the 1969-70 War of Attrition. Aid to Israel increased during the fighting, consistent with Nixon and Kissinger's belief that steadfast support for Israel would reveal the limited value of Soviet aid and eventually convince Moscow's Arab clients to realign with the United States. Although the Nixon administration did not give Israel all the weapons it asked for, which occasionally led
to sharp exchanges between the two governments, the United States did provide increased arms supplies while doing relatively little to encourage Israeli concessions in the various peace talks that occurred during this period. When the escalating violence raised new fears of a possible superpower confrontation, however, Washington took the lead in arranging a cease-fire and persuaded Israel to accept it by promising significant aid increases.101 A memorandum of understanding in 1972 committed the United States to provide planes and tanks on a long-term basis, and Nixon and Kissinger pledged to consult Israel before offering any new peace proposals. By doing so, one of the world's two superpowers had in effect given a small country a quasi veto over subsequent diplomatic initiatives. By the early 1970s, writes William Quandt, "United States Middle East policy consisted of little more than open support for Israel," and Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban later termed this period the "golden age" in U.S. arms supplies.102
   U.S. support was even more dramatic during the October War in 1973. Nixon and Kissinger were initially confident that Israel would win a quick victory and believed that America's postwar leverage would be maximized if its support for Israel was not too overt and Israel did not win too decisively. As Kissinger recounts in his memoirs, "If Israel won overwhelmingly—as we first expected—we had to avoid becoming the focal point of all Arab resentments. We had to keep the Soviet Union from emerging as the Arabs' savior .. . If the unexpected happened and Israel was in difficulty, we would have to do what was necessary to save it."103 Given these expectations and strategic objectives, the United States responded slowly to Israel's initial requests for help. When Israel encountered unexpected difficulties and began running short of critical military supplies, however, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a full-scale airlift of vital military equipment, paid for with a $2.2 billion grant of supplemental military aid.104 Although the tide of battle had already turned before significant U.S. aid arrived, the assistance boosted Israel's morale and helped seal its victory.105 Unfortunately for the United States, the resupply effort also triggered an Arab oil embargo and production decrease that quickly sent world oil prices soaring and imposed significant economic costs on the United States and its allies.
   Within certain limits, U.S. diplomacy during the war favored Israel: the United States helped convince King Hussein of Jordan to remain on the sidelines, and Kissinger handled the cease-fire negotiations (most notably his talks with Soviet leaders in Moscow on October 21) with an eye toward preserving Israel's freedom of action until the final stages of the war. Nixon had instructed Kissinger to tell Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that
the United States "wanted to use the war to impose a comprehensive peace in the Middle East," but in Moscow Kissinger successfully pressed for a simple cease-fire that would leave Israel with the upper hand and facilitate subsequent efforts to exclude the Soviet Union from the peace process. According to the historian Kenneth Stein, "The American-compiled minutes of the three meetings that Kissinger attended with Brezhnev unequivocally show that he accurately and repeatedly represented Israeli interests to Moscow, almost totally contrary to Nixon's preferences." Israel's leaders resented what they saw as Soviet-American collusion to author a cease-fire, but as Stein notes, "Kissinger, while not representing Israel to the Kremlin, certainly presented Israel's concerns."106
   When the Security Council passed a cease-fire resolution on October 22, calling for an end to all fighting within twelve hours, Kissinger permitted Israel to violate it in order to consolidate its military position. He had previously told Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz that Israel would be "well-advised" to use the time afforded by his trip to Moscow to complete its military operations, and according to the National Security Archive, a Washington-based research group that specializes in declassified U.S. sources, "Kissinger secretly gave Israeli authorities a green light to breach [the] ceasefire agreement" in order to "buy time for Israeli military advances despite the impending ceasefire deadline."107 When the cease-fire broke down completely and the IDF surrounded Egypt's Third Army, prompting a blunt Soviet threat to intervene with its own troops, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a worldwide military alert, issued a sharp warning to Moscow to stay out, and told the Israelis it was now time to stop the fighting.
   Although there was considerable hard bargaining during the subsequent "step-by-step" diplomacy leading to the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement, the United States still worked to protect Israel's interests. In addition to giving Israel increased military aid, the United States pledged to "concert action" with Israel when preparing for a subsequent peace conference and gave Israel a de facto veto over PLO participation in any future peace talks. Indeed, Kissinger promised that the United States would not "recognize or negotiate" with the PLO so long as it did not recognize Israel's right to exist or accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338 (the cease-fire resolutions that ended the 1967 and 1973 wars, respectively, and called for Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories along with acknowledgment of its sovereignty and independence), a pledge that Congress codified into law in 1984.108 According to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, "[Israeli Prime Minister] Rabin made it clear to Kissinger that the cabinet would not ratify the Sinai II [disengagement] agreement unless it
was accompanied by an American-Israeli agreement." Shlaim terms the resulting arrangements "an alliance with America in all but name."109
   The United States came to Israel's aid once again following its ill-conceived invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Amid escalating violence between Israel and PLO forces in southern Lebanon, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon sought American approval for a military response intended to drive the PLO from Lebanon, eliminate Syrian influence, and bring the leader of the Lebanese Christians, Bashir Gemayel, to power. U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig appeared to give conditional approval for the scheme in his talks with Israeli officials—saying at one point that a hypothetical Israeli response should be swift, "like a lobotomy"—though he probably did not know the full extent of Israel's ambitions and cautioned that Israel should act only if there were, as Haig put it, an "internationally recognized provocation."110 Israel eventually invaded in June 1982 (even though Haig's criterion had not been met), but its ambitious plan to reorder Lebanese internal politics soon went awry. Although the IDF quickly routed the PLO and Syrian forces, the PLO remnants took refuge in Beirut and the IDF could not remove them without suffering extensive casualties and causing massive harm to Lebanese civilians. U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib eventually negotiated a deal to end the siege and permit the PLO to withdraw, and several thousand U.S. marines were subsequently dispatched to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.
   Gemayel's assassination in September thwarted Israel's hope of creating a pro-Israel government in Lebanon, and the IDF then allowed Christian militias to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where they proceeded to slaughter a large number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, with estimated death tolls ranging from roughly seven hundred to more than two thousand.111 Repeated efforts to end Lebanon's internal struggles and foreign occupation failed, and U.S. personnel were gradually drawn into the intensifying Lebanese maelstrom. A suicide bomber struck the American embassy in April 1983, killing sixty-three people, and a truck bomb attack on the marine barracks in October left 241 marines dead and paved the way for a complete U.S. withdrawal the following year.
   Even though U.S. officials—including President Reagan himself—were upset by Israel's conduct during the war, they did not try to punish Israel for its actions.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:26:26 GMT

Even though U.S. officials—including President Reagan himself—were upset by Israel's conduct during the war, they did not try to punish Israel for its actions. Reagan did send Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin a sharply worded letter on June 9, calling on him to accept a proposed ceasefire with Syria, but the IDF's objectives vis-a-vis Syria had been accomplished by that time and it involved no great sacrifice for Israel to agree.112
"Despite verbal protestations and other gestures and occasional genuine irritation," notes the historian and diplomat Itamar Rabinovich, the United States "lent Israel the political support that enabled it to proceed with the war for an unusually long time."113
Indeed, instead of sanctioning Israel for invading a neighboring country, Congress voted to give Israel an additional $250 million in military assistance in December 1982, over the strong objections of both President Reagan and his new secretary of state, George P. Shultz. As Shultz later recalled:

In early December [1982] ... I got word that a supplement was moving through the lame-duck session of Congress to provide a $250 million increase in the amount of U.S. military assistance granted to Israel: this in the face of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, its use of cluster bombs, and its complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres! We fought the supplement and fought it hard. President Reagan and I weighed in personally, making numerous calls to senators and congressmen. On December 9, I added a formal letter of opposition saying that the supplement appeared "to endorse and reward Israel's policies." Foreign Minister Shamir called President Reagan's opposition "an unfriendly act" and said that "it endangers the peace process." The supplement sailed right by us and was approved by Congress as though President Reagan and I had not even been there. I was astonished and disheartened. This brought home to me vividly Israel's leverage in our Congress. I saw that I must work carefully with the Israelis if I was to have any handle on congressional action that might affect Israel and if I was to maintain congressional support for my efforts to make progress in the Middle East.114

Yet Shultz and Reagan soon followed Congress's lead: the 1981 MOU on strategic cooperation (suspended after Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights) was reinstated in November 1983, because key U.S. officials believed that close cooperation with Israel was the only way to influence Israel's behavior.115
   America's tendency to side with Israel extends to peace negotiations as well. The United States played a key role in the abortive peace efforts that followed the Six-Day War, as well as the talks that ended the War of Attrition in 1970. The United States agreed to consult with Israel before launching further peace initiatives in 1972, and Kissinger was never able to bring much pressure to bear on Israel during his conduct of the "step-by-step"
diplomacy that followed the October War. Kissinger complained at one point during the negotiations, "I ask Rabin to make concessions, and he says he can't because Israel is weak. So I give him more arms, and then he says he doesn't need to make concessions because Israel is strong."116 As discussed above, the disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel were produced primarily through pledges of additional U.S. aid and by an American commitment to station civilian monitors in the Sinai.
   The same pattern can be seen in the Clinton administration's handling of the negotiations that produced the 1993 Oslo Accords and the unsuccessful attempt to reach a final status agreement in 1999-2000. There was occasional friction between Clinton administration officials and their Israeli counterparts, but the United States coordinated its positions closely with Israel and generally backed Israel's approach to the peace process, even when U.S. representatives had serious reservations about Israel's strategy.117 According to one Israeli negotiator, Ron Pundak, a key representative in the negotiations leading to Oslo and one of the architects of the subsequent framework agreement for the final status talks at Camp David in 2000, "The traditional approach of the [U.S.] State Department. . . was to adopt the position of the Israeli Prime Minister. This was demonstrated most extremely during the Netanyahu government, when the American government seemed sometimes to be working jbr the Israeli Prime Minister, as it tried to convince (and pressure) the Palestinian side to accept Israeli offers. This American tendency was also evident during Barak's tenure."118
   U.S. participants in the peace process have offered similar judgments. According to Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs under President Clinton and another key Camp David participant, "The [Israeli] ideas put forward at Camp David were never stated in writing . . . They generally were presented as U.S. concepts, not Israeli ones." This practice underscores the degree to which the United States was providing Israel with diplomatic help even when supposedly acting as a neutral mediator. U.S. negotiators were also constrained by the "no-surprise rule," which Malley describes as "the American commitment, if not to clear, at least to share in advance, each of its ideas with Israel. Because Barak's strategy precluded early exposure of his bottom lines to anyone (the President included), he would invoke the 'no-surprise rule' to argue against US substantive proposals he felt went too far. The US ended up (often unwittingly) presenting Israeli negotiating positions and couching them as rock-bottom red lines beyond which Israel could not go."119 As Aaron David Miller, an adviser to six different secretaries of state on Middle East and Arab-Israeli affairs and another key player in the Clinton ad
ministration's peace effort, put it during a 2005 postmortem on the failed negotiations: "Far too often, we functioned ... as Israel's lawyer."120

CONCLUSION

Since Israel's founding in 1948, many important elements of America's Middle East policy have come to center around its commitment to the Jewish state. As we shall discuss in detail in Part II, this tendency has become even more pronounced with the passage of time. To note one final sign of Israel's privileged position among U.S. allies: since 1976, six Israeli leaders have addressed joint sessions of Congress, a higher total than for any other country.121 A trivial indicator, perhaps, but it is still striking given that these six leaders represented a country whose 2007 population was less than that of New York City.
   Yitzhak Rabin was right: America's generosity toward Israel is "beyond compare in modern history." It has grown from modest beginnings to a "special relationship" that has no equal. As Mitchell Bard and Daniel Pipes put it, "From a comparative perspective, the United States and Israel may well have the most extraordinary tie in international politics."122
   This support has accomplished one positive end: it has helped Israel prosper. For many people, that fact alone might justify all of the support that the United States has provided over the years. Given this record, it is no surprise that a June 2003 Pew poll found that in twenty out of twenty-one countries surveyed—including close U.S. allies like Britain, France, Canada, and Australia—either a majority or plurality of the population believes that U.S. Middle East policy "favors Israel too much." What is more surprising, perhaps, is that a plurality of Israelis (47 percent) agreed.123
   Although the United States has derived a number of benefits from its support for Israel and from Israel's undeniable achievements, it has given far more than it has gained. This generosity would be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset for the United States—that is, if Israel's existence and continued growth made the United States substantially safer. It would also be easy to explain if there were a compelling moral rationale for maintaining such high levels of material aid and diplomatic backing. But this is not the case. In the next two chapters, we show that neither strategic interests nor moral imperatives can explain why the United States continues to give Israel such generous and unconstrained support.

ISRAEL: STRATEGIC ASSET OR LIABILITY?

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:25:26 GMT

ISRAEL: STRATEGIC ASSET OR LIABILITY?

America's willingness to give Israel extensive economic, military, and diplomatic support would be easy to understand if it advanced America's overall strategic interests. Generous aid to Israel might be justified, for example, if it were a cost-effective way for the United States to deal with countries that Washington had previously identified as hostile. Steadfast U.S. support might also make sense if the United States received substantial benefits in return, and if the value of these benefits exceeded the economic and political costs of U.S. support. If Israel possessed vital natural resources (such as oil or natural gas), or if it occupied a critical geographic location, then the United States might want to provide support in order to maintain good relations and keep it out of unfriendly hands. In short, aid to Israel would be easy to explain if it helped make Americans more secure or more prosperous. Israel's strategic value to the United States would be further enhanced if backing it won America additional friends around the world and did not undermine U.S. relations with other strategically important countries.
   Not surprisingly, those who favor generous U.S. support for Israel routinely make these sorts of arguments. In the 1980s, for example, scholars such as Steven Spiegel and A.F.K. Organski argued that Israel had become a major strategic asset in the Cold War and claimed that generous U.S. aid was a bargain given the benefits it produced for the United States.1 As Hyman Bookbinder, Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, put it in 1984, "We bend over backward to help people understand that help for Israel is also in America's strategic interests."2 Today, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most influential pro-Israel lobbying organization, declares that the United States and Israel have a "deep strategic partner
ship aimed at confronting the common threats to both nations" and says that United States-Israel cooperation in defense and homeland security "has proven to be of paramount and ever-increasing importance."3 The neoconser-vative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calls Israel "America's staunchest ally against international terrorism," and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) says, "U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation is a vital component in the global security equation for the United States."4 According to Martin Kramer, a research fellow at Israel's Shalem Center and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the United States backs Israel not because of "Holocaust guilt or shared democratic values," but because aid to Israel "underpins the pax Americana in the Eastern Mediterranean" and provides a "low-cost way of keeping order in part of the Middle East."5 The Israeli strategist Efraim Inbar agrees, declaring that "the case for the continued US support of Israel as an important strategic ally due to its strategic location and political stability, as well as its technological and military assets, is very strong."6
   The strategic rationale for extensive U.S. support of the Jewish state portrays this policy not as an act of charity or as a moral obligation, and certainly not as a consequence of domestic lobbying.7 Instead, steadfast support for Israel is said to be a reflection of America's overarching strategic interests: the United States backs Israel because doing so supposedly makes all Americans safer.
   In this chapter, we show that this view is at best outdated and at worst simply wrong. Backing Israel may have yielded strategic benefits in the past, but the benefits have declined sharply in recent years while the economic and diplomatic costs have increased. Instead of being a strategic asset, in fact, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. Backing Israel so strongly is making Americans more vulnerable—not less—and making it harder for the United States to achieve important and urgent foreign policy goals. Although there are compelling reasons for the United States to support Israel's existence and to remain committed to its survival, the current level of U.S. support and its largely unconditional nature cannot be justified on strategic grounds.
   We begin by evaluating Israel's role during the Cold War, because the claim that Israel was a strategic asset is most convincing during this period. We then consider the argument that was invoked after the Soviet Union disappeared—specifically, the claim that support for Israel is justified by a common threat from international terrorism and a set of hostile "rogue
states"—and we show that this claim does not provide a credible strategic rationale for unconditional U.S. support either.

HELPING CONTAIN THE SOVIET BEAR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:24:27 GMT

HELPING CONTAIN THE SOVIET BEAR

When Israel was founded in 1948, U.S. policy makers did not consider it a strategic asset. The new state was regarded as weak and potentially vulnerable, and American policy makers recognized that embracing Israel too closely would undermine the U.S. position elsewhere in the Middle East. President Truman's decision to support the UN partition plan and to recognize Israel was based not on strategic imperatives but on his genuine sympathy for Jewish suffering, a certain religious conviction that permitting Jews to return to their ancient homeland was desirable, and an awareness that recognition was strongly backed by many American Jews and would therefore yield domestic political benefits.8 At the same time, several of Truman's key advisers—including Secretary of State George Marshall and policy-planning head George Kennan—opposed the decision because they believed it would jeopardize U.S. relations with the Arab world and facilitate Soviet penetration of the region. As Kennan noted in an internal memorandum in 1948, "Supporting the extreme objectives of political Zionism" would be "to the detriment of overall U.S. security objectives" in the Middle East. Specifically, he argued it would increase opportunities for the Soviet Union, endanger oil concessions, and jeopardize U.S. basing rights in the region.9
   This view had eroded by the early 1960s, and the Kennedy administration concluded that Israel deserved more support in light of growing Soviet aid to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.10 Israeli leaders repeatedly emphasized their potential value as an ally, and their stunning victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 strengthened these claims by offering a vivid demonstration of Israel's military prowess. As discussed in the previous chapter, Nixon and Kissinger saw increased support for Israel as an effective way to counter Soviet influence throughout the region.11 The image of Israel as a "strategic asset" took root in the 1970s and became an article of faith by the mid-1980s.
   The case for Israel's strategic value from 1967 to 1989 is straightforward. By serving as America's proxy in the Middle East, Israel helped the United States contain Soviet expansion in that important region and occasionally helped the United States handle other regional crises.12 By inflicting humiliating military defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six-
Day War and 1973 October War, Israel also damaged Moscow's reputation as an ally while enhancing U.S. prestige. This was a key element of Nixon and Kissinger's Cold War strategy: backing Israel to the hilt would make it impossible for Egypt or Syria to regain the territory lost in 1967 and thus demonstrate the limited value of Soviet support. This strategy bore fruit in the 1970s, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat severed ties with Moscow and realigned with the United States, a breakthrough that paved the way to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. Israel's repeated victories also forced the Soviets to expend precious resources rearming their clients after each defeat, a task that the overstretched Soviet economy could ill afford.
   By providing the United States with intelligence about Soviet capabilities, Soviet client states, and the Middle East more generally, Israel also facilitated the broader American campaign against the Soviet Union. In 1956, for example, an Israeli spy obtained a copy of Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin, which Israel promptly passed on to the United States. In the 1960s, Israel gave U.S. defense experts access to a Soviet MiG-21 aircraft obtained from an Iraqi defector and provided similar access to Soviet equipment captured in the 1967 and 1973 wars.13 Finally, the United States benefited from access to Israeli training facilities, advanced technology developed by Israeli defense companies, and consultations with Israeli experts on counterterrorism and other security problems.
   This justification for supporting Israel is factually correct, and Israel may well have been a net strategic asset during this period. Yet the case is not as open and shut as Israel's advocates maintain and was questioned by some U.S. experts at the time.14 Why? Because in addition to the direct economic burden, the growing partnership with Israel imposed significant costs on the United States, and because Israel's capacity to help its vastly more powerful partner was inherently limited.
   First, although Israel's military did help check Soviet client states like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, America's commitment to Israel played a significant role in pushing those states into Moscow's arms in the first place. Egypt and Syria had been engaged in a bitter conflict with Israel since the late 1940s, and they were unable to get help from Washington despite several requests. American support for Israel was nowhere near as generous as it is today, but the United States was still committed to Israel's survival and was not going to do anything to undermine its security—in particular, the United States was unwilling to provide either Egypt or Syria with weapons that might be used against the Jewish state. As a result, when an Israeli attack on an Egyptian army base in Gaza in February 1955 killed thirty-seven Egyptian soldiers and
wounded another thirty-one, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was forced to turn to the Soviet Union for arms instead. Nasser repeatedly referred to the Gaza raid as a "turning point," precipitating the first major Arab arms deal with Moscow, which made the Soviet Union a major player in Middle East affairs virtually overnight. The raid also led Nasser to shut down a secret negotiating channel with the Israeli government and to shift from modest efforts to limit Arab infiltration to active support for it.15 Given their continuing conflict with Israel and America's reluctance to provide them with arms, Israel's main Arab adversaries had little choice but to seek help from the Soviets, despite their own misgivings about moving closer to Moscow.16
   Second, although U.S. support for Israel put more pressure on the Soviet Union, it also fueled the Arab-Israeli conflict and inhibited progress toward a settlement, a result that continues to haunt both Israel and the United States. The Nixon/Kissinger strategy eventually succeeded in pulling Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, but the tendency to view Middle East issues primarily through the prism of the Cold War (and thus to back Israel no matter what) also led the United States to overlook several promising opportunities for peace, most notably Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's repeated signals that he was prepared to cut a deal in 1971-72.17 Speaking to a private group in 1975, Kissinger recalled that Secretary of State William Rogers's efforts to reach an interim agreement in 1971 had broken down "over whether or not 1,000 Egyptian soldiers would be permitted across the Canal. That agreement would have prevented the 1973 War. I must say now that I am sorry that I did not support the Rogers effort more than I did."18
   Third, the expansion and deepening of U.S.-Israeli relations in the 1960s and 1970s also contributed to the rise of anti-Americanism across the Arab and Islamic world. "At the time of World War I," notes the Rice University historian Ussama Makdisi, "the image of the United States in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire was generally positive; those Arabs who knew of the country saw it as a great power that was not imperialist as Britain, France, and Russia were."19 Even after Israel was founded, Arab resentment was limited by U.S. efforts to play an evenhanded role in the Middle East and by the fact that France, not the United States, was Israel's main arms supplier until 1967. What conflicts there were with "progressive" Arab states such as Nasser's Egypt partly reflected disagreements about Israel but also stemmed from U.S. support for conservative Middle Eastern monarchies (the shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, the House of Saud), who were all deeply hostile to Nasser as well. Unfortunately for the United States, its support for these regimes (which Washington saw as "moderate"
and its opponents deemed "reactionary") and for Israel fueled a growing tendency for many Arabs to see it as the heir to Britain's former imperial role.20
   Arab animosity increased as U.S. support for Israel grew and was compounded by Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in 1967 and by its subsequent repression of the Palestinian Arabs living in what came to be known as the Occupied Territories. During the Cold War, this situation made some Middle Eastern regimes more interested in close ties with the Soviet Union and further reduced U.S. influence. It also contributed to the rise of Arab and Islamic extremism, as some prescient analysts had predicted two decades ago. Writing in 1985-86, for example, Harry Shaw, former head of the Office of Management and Budget's Military Assistance Branch, warned that "Israel's settlement policy on the West Bank is at cross-purposes with U.S. interests and contrary to U.S. policy. The lack of progress toward a peace settlement—for which Israel and its Arab neighbors share responsibility—undercuts Arabs who are willing to live in peace and strengthens the influence of Islamic fundamentalists and other Arabs who have no interest in the kind of stable Middle East that would be compatible with U.S. interests and Israel's security."21 America's relations with the Arab and Islamic world would hardly have been perfect were Israel not a U.S. ally, but a more evenhanded approach would have smoothed one important source of friction. This basic fact was not lost on the Israeli military leader and politician Moshe Dayan, whose memoirs contain a revealing account of a talk he had with Kissinger at the time of the 1973 October War. "Though I happened to remark that the United States was the only country that was ready to stand by us," wrote Dayan, "my silent reflection was that the United States would really rather support the Arabs."22
   Support for Israel imposed additional costs on the United States, such as the Arab oil embargo and production decrease during the October War. The decision to use the "oil weapon" was a direct response to Nixon's decision to provide Israel with $2.2 billion of emergency military assistance during the war, and it ultimately did significant damage to the U.S. economy. The embargo and production decrease cost the United States some $48.5 billion in 1974 alone (equal to roughly $140 billion in 2000 dollars), due to higher petroleum costs and an estimated 2 percent reduction in GDP. The oil crisis also led to serious strains in America's relations with key allies in Europe and Asia.23 Helping Israel defeat two Soviet clients may have been a positive development in terms of America's broader Cold War concerns, but the United States paid a high price for the victory.
Israel's other Cold War contributions were useful, but their strategic
value should not be overstated. Israel did indeed provide the United States with helpful intelligence, for instance, but there is no evidence that Jerusalem gave Washington information that decisively altered the course of the superpower competition or enabled America to inflict a decisive blow against its Communist adversary. The primary benefit seems to have been access to captured Soviet weapons and to data regarding their battlefield performance, as well as debriefings from Soviet Jews who had immigrated to Israel. The United States used this information to help develop weapons and tactics that would have been valuable had the superpowers ever come to blows, and this information has undoubtedly helped the United States when it has fought former Soviet clients such as Iraq. But Iraq was a third-rate military power and the United States scarcely needed much help to defeat Saddam in 1991 or to oust him in 2003. Access to Israeli training facilities and consultations with Israeli experts were also useful and appreciated, but these arrangements were never essential to the development of American military power or to its ultimate triumph over the Soviet Union.
   In fact, Israeli "assistance" was sometimes of dubious value. One former CIA official reports being "appalled at the lack of quality of the [Israeli] political intelligence on the Arab world . . . Their tactical military intelligence was first-rate. But they didn't know their enemy. I saw this political intelligence and it was lousy, laughably bad ... It was gossip stuff mostly."24 Israel also provided the United States with faulty or misleading intelligence on several occasions, probably in order to encourage the United States to take actions that Israel wanted. Prior to the Six-Day War, for example, Israeli intelligence assessments painted a grim and frightening picture of Egyptian capabilities and intentions, which American intelligence officials believed was both incorrect and politically motivated. As National Security Adviser W. W. Rostow told President Johnson, "We do not believe that the Israeli appreciation presented . . . was a serious estimate of the sort they would submit to their own high officials. We think it is probably a gambit intended to influence the US to do one or more of the following: (a) provide military supplies, (b) make more public commitments to Israel, (c) approve Israeli military initiatives, and (d) put more pressure on Nasser."25 As we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 8, Israel also supplied the United States with alarmist reports about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs prior to the 2003 invasion, thereby contributing to U.S. miscalculations about the actual danger that Saddam Hussein presented.26
   Nor has Israel been a reliable proxy safeguarding other U.S. interests in the region. When Martin Kramer claims that "American support for Is
rael. . . underpins the pax Americana in the Eastern Mediterranean" and has been a "low cost way of keeping order in part of the Middle East," he both exaggerates the benefits of this relationship and understates the costs.27 Stability in the eastern Mediterranean is desirable, but the region is not a vital U.S. strategic interest, in sharp contrast to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. And if Israel's strategic value derives from its role enforcing the "pax Americana" in this region, then it has not been doing a particularly good job. Its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 made the region less stable and led directly to the formation of Hezbollah, the militant group that many believe is responsible for the devastating attacks on the U.S. embassy and marine barracks that cost more than 250 American lives. The suicide bombers are to blame for these deaths, but the loss of life was part of the price the United States had to pay in order to clean up the situation that Israel had created. Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza (indirectly subsidized by U.S. aid and undertaken in part with U.S.-made weapons) has also produced two major uprisings in which thousands of Palestinians and Israelis have been killed. Thus, Kramer seriously overstates Israel's value as a low-cost "regional stabilizer."
   Israel's limited strategic value is further underscored by its inability to contribute to an undeniable U.S. interest: access to Persian Gulf oil. Despite Israel's vaunted military prowess, the United States could not count on its help during the Cold War to deter a direct Soviet assault on Western oil supplies or to protect them in the event of a regional war. As Harry Shaw noted in the mid-1980s, "Some Israeli officials explicitly reject Israeli engagement of Soviet ground forces beyond their country's immediate defense . . . These Israelis acknowledge as far-fetched the notion that Israeli divisions would advance beyond Israel's borders to meet a Soviet thrust toward the Persian Gulf."28 According to a former Pentagon official, "Israel's strategic value to the United States was always grotesquely exaggerated. When we were drafting contingency plans for the Middle East in the 1980s, we found that the Israelis were of little value to us in 95 percent of the cases."29
   As a result, when the shah of Iran fell in 1979, raising concerns about a possible Soviet invasion, the United States had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) to counter that threat and arrange for basing rights and preposition war materiel in various Arab countries. The Pentagon could not count on Israel to deter the Soviet Union by itself and could not use Israel as a forward base—Israeli offers notwithstanding—because doing so would have caused political problems in the Arab world and made it even harder to keep the Soviets out of the region. As Shaw remarked in 1986, "The notion of using Israel as a platform for projecting U.S. forces into Arab
states ... is not widely supported outside Israel. Arab analysts argue that an Arab regime that accepted American help funneled through Israel would be discredited with its own people and therefore would be more likely to fall. . . U.S. officials also are skeptical of the feasibility of using Israeli bases. The Israeli offers may be designed primarily to entice the United States into closer relations and to enhance the rationale for more U.S. aid without requirements for specific Israeli commitments."30 Israel's limited capacity to help in the Gulf was revealed in the late 1980s, when the Iran-Iraq War jeopardized the safety of oil shipments in the Persian Gulf. The United States and several of its European allies reinforced their naval forces in the region, began escorting oil tankers, and eventually attacked some Iranian patrol boats, but Israel had no part to play in these operations.31
   Ultimately, although a limited case can be made for Israel's strategic value during the Cold War, it does not fully explain why the United States provided it with so much economic, military, and diplomatic support. It is easy to understand why the United States devoted billions to defending its NATO allies—Europe was a key center of industrial power that had to be kept out of Soviet hands—and equally easy to grasp the strategic motivation behind U.S. support for oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, despite sharply contrasting political values. In Israel's case, however, this sort of obvious strategic imperative was never as clear. Henry Kissinger may have used U.S. aid to Israel as a way to drive a wedge between Moscow and Cairo, but he admitted privately that "Israeli strength does not prevent the spread of communism in the Arab world ... So it is difficult to claim that a strong Israel serves American interests because it prevents the spread of communism in the Arab world. It does not. It provides for the survival of Israel."32 Ronald Reagan may have called Israel a "strategic asset" when he was campaigning for president in 1980, but he did not mention Israel's strategic value in his memoirs and referred instead to various moral considerations to explain his support for the Jewish state.33
   Thoughtful Israeli analysts have long recognized this basic reality. As the Israeli strategic expert Shai Feldman, former head of Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, noted in his own study of U.S.-Israeli security cooperation, "The strategic dimension of America's motivation for supporting Israel never comprised the core of these relations. Rather, this dimension received growing emphasis in the 1980s as Israel's American supporters sought to base U.S.-Israel relations on grounds that would be more appealing to Republican administrations. Yet, the significance of U.S.Israel strategic cooperation and the extent to which Israel is perceived as a
strategic asset to the United States never approached that of the other elements in the U.S.-Israel relationship.'' Those "other elements," according to Feldman, were post-Holocaust sympathy, shared political values, Israel's underdog image, common cultural linkages, and "the role of the Jewish community in American politics."34

FROM THE COLD WAR TO 9/11

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:23:28 GMT

FROM THE COLD WAR TO 9/11

Even if Israel was a valuable ally during the Cold War, that justification ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. According to the Middle East historian Bernard Lewis (himself a prominent supporter of Israel), "Whatever value Israel might have had as a strategic asset during the Cold War, that value obviously ended when the Cold War itself came to a close." The political scientist Bernard Reich of George Washington University, the author of several books on U.S.-Israeli relations, drew a similar conclusion in 1995, noting that "Israel is of limited military or economic importance to the United States ... It is not a strategically vital state." The Brandeis University defense expert Robert Art made the same point in 2003, noting that "Israel has little strategic value to the United States and is in many ways a strategic liability."35 As the Cold War receded into history, Israel's declining strategic value became hard to miss.
   In fact, the Gulf War in 1991 provided evidence that Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The United States and its allies eventually assembled more than four hundred thousand troops to liberate Kuwait, but they could not use Israeli bases or allow the IDF to participate without jeopardizing the fragile coalition against Iraq. And when Saddam fired Scud missiles into Israel in the hope of provoking an Israeli response that would fracture the coalition, Washington had to divert resources (such as Patriot missile batteries) to defend Israel and to keep it on the sidelines. Israel was not to blame for this situation, of course, but it illustrates the extent to which it was becoming a liability rather than an asset. As William Waldegrave, minister of state in the British Foreign Office, told the House of Commons, the United States might now be learning that a strategic alliance with Israel "was not particularly useful if it cannot be used in a crisis such as this." This point was not lost on Bernard Lewis, either, who wrote, "The change [in Israel's strategic value] was clearly manifested in the Gulf War . . . when what the United States most desired from Israel was to keep out of the conflict—to be silent, inactive, and, as far as possible, invisible . . . Israel was not an asset, but an irrelevance—some even said a nuisance."36
   One might think that the shared threat from international terrorism provided a powerful rationale for United States-Israel cooperation in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, but this is not the case. The Oslo peace process was under way during most of the 1990s, and Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel were declining, from 67 killed and 167 injured in 1994 to only 1 dead and only 12 injured in 2000. (Israeli casualties rose again after Oslo collapsed, with 110 Israelis killed and 918 injured in 2001 and 320 killed and 1,498 injured in 2002.)37 U.S. policy makers were becoming more concerned about Islamic terrorism—including al Qaeda—especially after the failed attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 1999. A number of new initiatives to deal with the problem were under way, but terrorism was still not widely perceived as a mortal threat and the U.S. "global war on terror" did not begin in earnest until after September 11, 2001.38
   Similarly, although both Israel and the United States were worried about "rogue states" such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria during this period, these states were too weak to pose a serious threat to the United States itself. Consider that the combined population of these four states in 2000 was less than 40 percent of America's; their combined GDP was barely more than 5 percent of U.S. GDP, and their combined military spending equaled a scant 3 percent of the U.S. defense budget.39 Iraq was subject to a punishing UN embargo, weapons inspectors were busy dismantling its WMD programs, and Iran's own WMD efforts were not far advanced. Syria, Iran, and Iraq were often at odds with each other, which made containing these states even easier and reduced the need to try to overthrow them.
   Instead, the United States adopted a policy of "dual containment" toward Iran and Iraq and made a serious but unsuccessful attempt to broker a final peace treaty between Syria and Israel.40 It also engaged in a protracted and ultimately successful effort to persuade Libya to give up its WMD programs and compensate the families of the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, a campaign waged through economic sanctions and patient multilateral diplomacy.41 Israel's capabilities were not needed to accomplish these objectives, because the United States could deal with these states by itself.
   In other words, Israel was not seen as a prized ally because U.S. policy makers believed its help was essential for dealing with these so-called rogue states. Rather, Washington worried about these states in good part because
it was already committed to protecting Israel. With respect to Iran, for example, the main points of contention between Tehran and Washington were Iran's opposition to the Camp David peace process, its support for Hezbollah, and its efforts to develop WMD. The importance of these issues was magnified substantially by the existing U.S. relationship with Israel.42 Washington did have interests in the region that were unrelated to Israel, of course—such as its desire to prevent any single state from dominating the Gulf and thereby ensure access to oil—and its pursuit of these interests occasionally led to friction with some states in the region. In particular, the United States would have undoubtedly opposed Iran's WMD efforts even if Israel had never existed. But the U.S. commitment to Israel made these issues seem even more urgent, without making them easier to address.
   Until September 11, 2001, the danger from terrorism and problems posed by these various rogue states did not provide a compelling strategic rationale for unconditional U.S. support of the Jewish state. These concerns explain why Israel wanted help from the United States but cannot account for America's willingness to provide that help as generously as it did.

"PARTNERS AGAINST TERROR": THE NEW RATIONALE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:22:42 GMT

"PARTNERS AGAINST TERROR": THE NEW RATIONALE

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the main strategic justification behind U.S. support for Israel became the claim that the two states were now "partners against terror." This new rationale depicts the United States and Israel as threatened by the same terrorist groups and by a set of rogue states that back these groups and seek to acquire WMD. Their hostility to Israel and the United States is said to be due to a fundamental antipathy to the West's Judeo-Christian values, its culture, and its democratic institutions. In other words, they hate Americans for "what we are," not for "what we do." In the same way, they hate Israel because it is also Western, modern, and democratic, and not because it has occupied Arab land, including important Islamic holy sites, and oppressed an Arab population.
   The implications of the new rationale are obvious: support for Israel plays no role in America's terrorism problem or the growing anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or making U.S. support for Israel more selective or conditional would not help. Washington should therefore give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and groups like Hezbollah. In addition, Washington should not press Israel to make concessions (such as dismantling settlements in the
Occupied Territories) until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned, repentant, or dead. Instead, the United States should continue to provide Israel with extensive support and use its own power and resources to go after countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Bashar al-Assad's Syria, and other countries believed to be supporting terrorists.
   Instead of seeing Israel as a major source of America's troubled relationship with the Arab and Islamic world, this new rationale portrays Israel as a key ally in the global "war on terror." Why? Because its enemies are said to be America's enemies. As Ariel Sharon put it during a visit to the United States in late 2001, after the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon: "You in America are in a war against terror. We in Israel are in a war against terror. It's the same war." According to a senior official in the first Bush administration, "Sharon played the president like a violin: 'I'm fighting your war, terrorism is terrorism' and so on."43 Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.S. Senate in 2002, "If we do not immediately shut down the terror factories where Arafat is producing human bombs, it is only a matter of time before suicide bombers will terrorize your cities. If not destroyed, this madness will strike in your buses, in your supermarkets, in your pizza parlors, in your cafes." Netanyahu also published an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times declaring, "No grievance, real or imagined, can ever justify terror . . . American power topples the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the al-Qaida network there crumbles on its own. The United States must now act similarly against the other terror regimes—Iran, Iraq, Yasser Arafat's dictatorship, Syria, and a few others."44 His successor, Ehud Barak, repeated this theme in an op-ed in the Times of London, declaring, "The world's governments know exactly who the terrorists are and exactly which rogue states support and promote their activity. Countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and North Korea have a proven track-record of sponsoring terrorism, while no one needs reminding of the carnage wrought by the terrorist thugs of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and even Yassir Arafat's own PLO."45 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert struck the same note in his own address to Congress in 2006, declaring, "Our countries do not just share the experience and pain of terrorism. We share the commitment and resolve to confront the brutal terrorists that took these innocent people from us."46
   Israel's American supporters offer essentially the same justification. In October 2001, WINEP's executive director, Robert Satloff, explained why the United States should continue to back Israel after September 11: "The answer should be clear, given the democratic values we share and the common enemies we face . . . No country has suffered more from the same sort
of terrorism that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than Israel."47 Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) declared in December 2001 that "the PLO is the same as the Taliban, which aids, abets and provides safe haven for terrorists. And Israel is like America, simply trying to protect its homefront . . . Arafat is to Israel as Mullah Mohammed [Omar] is to America."48 In April and May 2002, Congress passed by overwhelming margins (352-21 in the House, 94-2 in the Senate) two nearly identical resolutions declaring that "the United States and Israel are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism."49 The official theme of the 2002 AIPAC annual conference was "America and Israel Standing Against Terror," and the conference presentations emphasized the shared threat from Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.50 PNAC made the same point in an open letter to President Bush in April 2002, signed by William Kristol, Richard Perle, William Bennett, Daniel Pipes, James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Norman Podhoretz, and twenty-eight others, most of them prominent neoconservatives. It declared, "No one should doubt that the United States and Israel share a common enemy. We are both targets of what you [Bush] have correctly called an 'Axis of Evil' ... As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has pointed out, Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all engaged in 'inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing' against Israel, just as they have aided campaigns of terrorism against the United States . . . You have declared war on international terrorism, Mr. President. Israel is fighting the same war."51
   This new justification has a certain prima facie plausibility, and it is not surprising that many Americans equate what happened on September 11 with attacks on Israelis. Upon further inspection, however, the "partners against terror" rationale unravels almost completely, especially as a justification for unconditional U.S. support. Viewed objectively, Israel is a liability in both the "war on terror" and in the broader effort to deal with so-called rogue states.
   To begin with, the new strategic rationale depicts "terrorism" as a single, unified phenomenon, thereby suggesting that Palestinian suicide bombers are as much a threat to the United States as they are to Israel itself, and that the terrorists who attacked America on September 11 are part of a well-organized global movement that is also targeting Israel. But this claim rests on a fundamental misconception of what terrorism is. Terrorism is not an organization or a movement or even an "enemy" that one can declare war on; terrorism is simply the tactic of indiscriminately attacking enemy targets— especially civilians—in order to sow fear, undermine morale, and provoke
counterproductive reactions from one's adversary. It is a tactic that many different groups sometimes employ, usually when they are much weaker than their adversaries and have no other good option for fighting against superior military forces. Zionists used terrorism when they were trying to drive the British out of Palestine and establish their own state—for example, by bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 and assassinating UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948, among other acts—and the United States has backed a number of "terrorist" organizations in the past (including the Nicaraguan contras and the UNITA guerrillas in Angola). American presidents have also welcomed a number of former terrorists to the White House (including PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who played key roles in the main Zionist terror organizations), which merely underscores the fact that terrorism is a tactic and not a unified movement. Clarifying this issue in no way justifies attacks on innocent people—which is always morally reprehensible—but it reminds us that groups that employ this method of struggle do not always threaten vital U.S. interests and that the United States has sometimes actively supported such groups.
   In contrast to al Qaeda, in fact, the terrorist organizations that threaten Israel (such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah) do not attack the United States and do not pose a mortal threat to America's core security interests. With respect to Hezbollah, for example, the Hebrew University historian Moshe Maoz observes that it "is mostly a threat against Israel. They did attack U.S. targets when there were American troops in Lebanon, but they killed to oust foreign forces from Lebanon. I doubt very much whether Hezbollah will go out of its way to attack America." The Middle East expert Patrick Seale agrees: "Hezbollah is a purely local phenomenon directed purely at the Israelis," and the terrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon echo this view with respect to Hamas, noting, "Thus far, Hamas has not targeted Americans."52 We may believe that all terrorist acts are morally wrong, but from the perspective of U.S. strategic interests, not all terrorists are alike.
   There is no convincing evidence linking Osama bin Laden and his inner circle to the various Palestinian terrorist groups, and most Palestinian terrorists do not share al Qaeda's desire to launch a global Islamic restoration or restore the caliphate. In fact, the PLO was secular and nationalist—not Islamist—and it is only in the last decade or so, as the occupation has ground on, that many Palestinians have become more attracted to Islamist ideas. Nor are their activities—however heinous and deplorable—simply random violence directed against Israel or the West. Instead, Palestinian terrorism has
always been directed solely at their perceived grievances against Israel, beginning with resistance to the original Zionist influx and continuing after the expulsion of much of the Palestinian population in the 1948 war. Today, these actions are largely a response to Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a reflection of the Palestinians' own weakness. These territories contained few Jews when Israel captured them in 1967, but Israel spent the next forty years colonizing them with settlements, road networks, and military bases, while brutally suppressing Palestinian attempts to resist these encroachments.53 Not surprisingly, Palestinian resistance has frequently employed terrorism, which is usually how subject populations strike back at powerful occupiers.54 And while groups like Hamas have yet to publicly accept Israel's existence, we should not forget that Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO did, and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has reiterated that commitment on numerous occasions.
   More important, claiming that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backward. The United States did not form an alliance with Israel because it suddenly realized that it faced a serious danger from "global terrorism" and urgently needed Israel's help to defeat it. In fact, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it has long been so supportive of Israel. It is hardly headline news to observe that U.S. backing for Israel is unpopular elsewhere in the Middle East—that has been true for several decades—but many people may not realize how much America's one-sided policies have cost it over the years. Not only have these policies helped inspire al Qaeda, but they have also facilitated its recruitment efforts and contributed to growing anti-Americanism throughout the region.
   Of course, those who believe that Israel is still a valuable strategic asset often deny that there was any connection between U.S. support for Israel and the terrorism problem, and especially not the September 11 attacks. They claim that Osama bin Laden seized on the plight of the Palestinians only recently, and only because he realized it was good for recruiting purposes. Thus, WINEP's Robert Satloff claims that bin Laden's identification with Palestine is "a recent—and almost surely opportunistic—phenomenon," and Alan Der-showitz declares, "Prior to September 11, Israel was barely on bin Laden's radar screen." Dennis Ross suggests that bin Laden was merely "trying to gain legitimacy by implying that his attack on America was about the plight of the Palestinians," and Martin Kramer says he knows of no "unbiased terrorism expert" who believes that "American support for Israel is the source of popular resentment, propelling recruits to al Qaeda." The former Commentary editor
Norman Podhoretz likewise argues that "if Israel had never come into existence, or if it were magically to disappear, the United States would still stand as an embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs consider evil."55
   It is not surprising that some of Israel's defenders offer such claims, because acknowledging that U.S. support for Israel has fueled anti-American terrorism and encouraged growing anti-Americanism would require them to admit that unconditional support for Israel does in fact impose significant costs on the United States. Such an admission would cast doubt on Israel's net strategic value and imply that Washington should make its support conditional on Israel adopting a different approach toward the Palestinians.
   Contrary to these claims, there is in fact abundant evidence that U.S. support for Israel encourages anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world and has fueled the rage of anti-American terrorists. It is not their only grievance, of course, but it is a central one.56 While some Islamic radicals are genuinely upset by what they regard as the West's materialism and venality, its alleged "theft" of Arab oil, its support for corrupt Arab monarchies, its repeated military interventions in the region, etc., they are also angered by U.S. support for Israel and Israel's harsh treatment of the Palestinians. Thus, Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also because of U.S. support for Israel.57 Or as Sayyid Muhammed Husayn Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Hezbollah, put it in 2002, "I believe that America bears responsibility for all of Israel, both in its occupation of the lands of [19]48 or in all its settlement policies [in the lands occupied since 1967], despite the occasional utterance of a few timid and embarrassed words which disapprove of the settlements . . . America is a hypocritical nation ... for it gives solid support and lethal weapons to the Israelis, but gives the Arabs and the Palestinians [only] words."58 One need not agree with such sentiments to recognize the potency of these arguments in the minds of many Arabs and to realize how unquestioned support for Israel has fueled anger and resentment against the United States.
   An even clearer demonstration of the connection between U.S. support for Israel and anti-American terrorism is the case of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Not only did Yousef mail letters to several New York newspapers, taking credit for the attack and demanding that the United States terminate aid to Israel, he also told the agents who flew him back to the United States following his arrest in Pakistan in 1995 that he felt guilty about
causing U.S. deaths. But as Steve Coll recounts in his prizewinning book Ghost Wars, Yousef s remorse was "overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops" and by his belief that "bombing American targets was the 'only way to cause change.'" Yousef reportedly also said that "he truly believed his actions had been rational and logical in pursuit of a change in U.S. policy toward Israel." According to Coll, Yousef "mentioned no other motivation during the flight and no other issue in American foreign policy that concerned him." Further corroboration comes from Yousef's associate Abdul Rahman Yasin, who told the CBS news correspondent Lesley Stahl that Yousef had recruited him by telling him that acts of terrorism would be "revenge for my Palestinian brothers and my brothers in Saudi Arabia," adding that Yousef "talked to me a lot about this."59
   Or consider the most obvious case: Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Contrary to the declarations of Satloff, Dershowitz, Kramer, and others, considerable evidence confirms that bin Laden has been deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause ever since he was a young man and that he has long been angry at the United States for backing Israel so strongly. According to Michael Scheuer, who directed the CIA's intelligence unit on al Qaeda and its founder, the young bin Laden was for the most part gentle and well behaved, but "an exception to Osama's well-mannered, nonconfrontational demeanor was his support for the Palestinians and negative attitude towards the United States and Israel."60 After September 11, bin Laden's mother told an interviewer that "in his teenage years he was the same nice kid . . . but he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general."61
   Moreover, bin Laden's first public statement intended for a wider audience—released December 29, 1994—directly addressed the Palestinian issue. As Bruce Lawrence, compiler of bin Laden's public statements, explains, "The letter makes it plain that Palestine, far from being a late addition to bin Laden's agenda, was at the centre of it from the start."62
   Bin Laden also condemned the United States on several occasions prior to September 11 for its support of Israel against the Palestinians and called for jihad against America on this basis. According to Benjamin and Simon, the "most prominent grievance" in bin Laden's 1996 fatwa (titled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places") is "bin Laden's hallmark: the 'Zionist-Crusader alliance."' Bin Laden refers explicitly to Muslim blood being spilled "in Palestine and Iraq" and blames it all on the "American-Israeli conspiracy."63 When the CNN reporter Peter Arnett asked him in March 1997 why he had declared jihad
against the United States, bin Laden replied, "We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Land of the Prophet's Night Journey [Palestine]. And we believe the US is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq."64 These comments are hardly anomalous. As Max Rodenbeck, Mideast correspondent for the Economist, writes in a prominent review of two important books about bin Laden, "Of all these themes, the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden's speeches."65
   The 9/11 Commission confirmed that bin Laden and other key al Qaeda members were motivated both by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and by U.S. support for Israel.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:21:36 GMT

The 9/11 Commission confirmed that bin Laden and other key al Qaeda members were motivated both by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and by U.S. support for Israel. A background study by the commission's staff notes that bin Laden tried to accelerate the date of the attack in the fall of 2000, after Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon's provocative visit (accompanied by hundreds of Israeli riot police) to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the three holiest sites in Islam. According to the staff statement, "although bin Laden recognized that [Mo-hamed] Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training, the al Qaeda leader wanted to punish the United States for supporting Israel."66 The following year, "when bin Laden learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House in June or July 2001, he attempted once more to accelerate the operation."67 In addition to informing the timing of the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden's anger at the United States for backing Israel had implications for his preferred choice of targets. In the first meeting between Atta, the mission leader, and bin Laden in late 1999, the initial plans called for hitting the U.S. Capitol because it was "the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."68 In short, bin Laden and his deputies clearly see the issue of Palestine as central to their agenda.
   The 9/11 Commission also notes that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed— whom it described as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks"—was primarily motivated by the Palestinian issue. In the commission's words, "By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."69 It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence of the role that U.S. support for Israel played in inspiring the 9/11 attacks.
Even if bin Laden himself were not personally engaged by the Palestinian
issue, it still provides him with an effective recruiting tool. Arab and Islamic anger has grown markedly since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, in part because the level of violence directed against the Palestinians has been both significantly greater and more visible.70 The First Intifada (1987-92) was much less violent, and there was relative calm in the Occupied Territories during the Oslo years (1993-2000). The development of the Internet and the emergence of alternative media outlets such as Al Jazeerah now provide round-the-clock coverage of the carnage. Not only is Israel inflicting more violence upon its Palestinian subjects, but Arabs and Muslims around the world can see it with their own eyes. And they can also see that it is being done with American-made weapons and with tacit U.S. consent. This situation provides potent ammunition for America's critics, which is why the deputy leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Nairn Qassem, told a Lebanese crowd in December 2006, "There is no longer a political place for America in Lebanon. Do you not recall that the weapons fired on Lebanon were American weapons?"71
   These policies help explain why many Arabs and Muslims are so angry with the United States that they regard al Qaeda with sympathy, and some are even willing to support it, either directly or tacitly. A 2004 survey of Moroccans reported that 8 percent had a "favorable" or "very favorable" image of President Bush, but the comparable figure for bin Laden was 45 percent. In Jordan, a key U.S. ally, the numbers were 3 percent for Bush and 55 percent for bin Laden, who beat Bush by a margin of 58 percent in Pakistan, whose government is also closely allied with the United States.72 The Pew Global Attitudes Survey reported in 2002—before the invasion of Iraq—that "public opinion about the United States in the Middle East/Conflict Area is overwhelmingly negative," and much of this unpopularity stems from the Palestinian issue.73 According to the Middle East expert Shibley Telhami, "No other issue resonates with the public in the Arab world, and many other parts of the Muslim world, more deeply than Palestine. No other issue shapes the regional perceptions of America more fundamentally than the issue of Palestine."74 Ussama Makdisi agrees, writing that "on no issue is Arab anger at the United States more widely and acutely felt than that of Palestine . . . For it is over Palestine that otherwise antithetical Arab secularist and Islamist interpretations of history converge in their common perception of an immense gulf separating official American avowals of support for freedom from actual American policies."75 U.S. support for Israel is not the only source of anti-Americanism, of course, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror and advancing other U.S. interests more difficult.
   Other government studies and numerous public opinion polls offer the same conclusion: Arab populations are deeply angered by America's support for Israel, which they regard as insensitive to Arab concerns and inconsistent with professed U.S. values. Although many Arabs have somewhat favorable views of U.S. science and technology, U.S. products, American movies and TV, and even surprisingly positive views of the American people and U.S. democracy, their views of American foreign policy—and especially U.S. support for Israel—are strongly negative.76 As a visiting Yemeni physicist remarked in 2001, "When you go there, you really love the United States . . . but when you go back home, you find the US applies justice and fairness to its own people, but not abroad."77 A 2004 report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board concluded that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies," and the 9/11 Commission acknowledged that "it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American policy in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world."78
   Similarly, when the respected polling firm Zogby International asked citizens of six Arab countries if their attitude toward America was shaped by their feelings about American values or by U.S. policies, "an overwhelming percentage of respondents indicated that policy played a more important role." When asked open-ended questions about their "first thought" when they think of America, the most common answer is "unfair foreign policy." And when asked what the United States could do to improve its image, the most frequent answers are "change Middle East policy" and "stop supporting Israel."79 Not surprisingly, after Congress directed the State Department to establish an "advisory group on public diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World" in June 2003, the group's report found that "citizens in these countries are genuinely distressed at the plight of the Palestinians and at the role they perceive the United States to be playing."80
   Prominent Arab leaders and well-informed public commentators confirm that unconditional U.S. support for Israel has made the United States increasingly unpopular throughout the Middle East. UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, whom the Bush administration enlisted to help form an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, said that "the great poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians," adding that people throughout the Middle East recognized the "injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support of the United States for this policy." In 2004, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned, "There exists a hatred [of America] never equaled in the region," in part be
cause Arabs "see [Israeli Prime Minister] Sharon act as he wants, without the Americans saying anything."81 King Abdullah II of Jordan offered a similar view in March 2007, telling a joint session of Congress that "the denial of justice and peace in Palestine ... is the core issue. And this core issue is not only producing severe consequences for our region, it is producing severe consequences for our world."82 Not surprisingly, these pro-American regimes want the United States to change a policy that reinforces popular discontent over their own ties to the United States.
   U.S. support for Israel is hardly the only source of anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world, and making it more conditional would not remove all sources of friction between these countries and the United States. Examining the consequences of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and tacit U.S. support of these policies is not to deny the presence of genuine anti-Semitism in various Arab countries or the fact that groups and governments in these societies sometimes fan these attitudes and use the Israel-Palestine conflict to divert attention from their own mistakes. Rather, our point is simply that the United States pays a substantial price for supporting Israel so consistently. This posture fuels hostility toward the United States in the Middle East, motivates anti-American extremists and aids their recruiting, gives authoritarian governments in the region an all-too-convenient scapegoat for their own failings, and makes it harder for Washington to convince potential supporters to confront extremists in their own countries.
   When it comes to fighting terrorism, in short, U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. Backing Israel against the Palestinians makes winning the war on terror harder, not easier, and the "partner against terror" rationale does not provide a compelling justification for unconditional U.S. support.

CONFRONTING ROGUE STATES

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:20:29 GMT

CONFRONTING ROGUE STATES

The new strategic rationale also portrays Israel as an essential ally in the campaign against authoritarian rogue states that support terrorism and that seek to acquire WMD. Like the "partners against terror" argument, this familiar justification sounds convincing at first hearing. Isn't it obvious that dictatorships like Syria, Iran, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq are hostile both to Israel and the United States? Aren't such regimes likely to use WMD to blackmail the United States, or give WMD to terrorists? Given these dangers, doesn't it make sense to continue generous aid to Israel, both to protect it from these dangerous neighbors and to keep the pressure on them,
thereby hastening the day when these brutal regimes either collapse or change their ways?
   In fact, this rationale does not stand up to careful scrutiny either. Although the United States does have important disagreements with each of these regimes—most notably their support for certain terrorist organizations and their apparent interest in acquiring WMD—they are not a dire threat to vital American interests, apart from the U.S. commitment to Israel itself. America's main strategic interest in the Middle East is oil, and protecting access to this commodity mainly depends on preventing any single country from controlling the entire region. This concern could justify going after one of these states if it grew too strong or too aggressive—as the United States did when it expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1990-91—but it does not justify going after Iran, Iraq, and Syria at the same time.
   The other features that are frequently invoked to explain why the United States should back Israel against these rogue states are even less compelling on strategic grounds. Does the fact that they are dictatorships justify relentless U.S. hostility? No, because the United States has allied itself with other dictatorships when doing so advanced its interests, and it still does so today. Is their support for terrorist groups a sufficient rationale? Not really, because these states and these terrorist groups have refrained from attacking the United States and because the United States has often turned a blind eye toward the promotion of terrorism in the past, including terrorism supported by these same states. Like most countries, the United States has been willing to cooperate with regimes it did not necessarily like when doing so advanced U.S. interests. Washington backed Saddam Hussein and Iraq during its war with Iran in the 1980s, for example, and it still backs Pakistan's military dictatorship despite that government's well-documented support for Islamic terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. U.S. leaders were also happy to accept Iran's help when dealing with the Taliban and pleased to get intelligence information about al Qaeda from Syria. These admittedly are limited instances of cooperation, but they do suggest that neither state is a mortal threat to vital U.S. interests.
   What about Syrian meddling in Lebanon or a potential Iranian challenge to U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf? These issues are not trivial, but they do not justify backing Israel as strongly as the United States does. Israel's own meddling in Lebanon has repeatedly complicated U.S. efforts there, and its own WMD arsenal and frequent willingness to use force have encouraged other Middle Eastern states to desire WMD of their own. As previously noted, Israel is not much of an asset when it comes to maintaining stability
in Lebanon or preserving a balance of power in the Gulf. As we discuss at length in Part II, Israel and the lobby have repeatedly frustrated U.S. efforts to deal more effectively with these admittedly problematic regimes.
   As a justification for helping Israel, in fact, this particular strategic argument is essentially circular. Israel is portrayed as a vital ally for dealing with its dangerous neighbors, but the commitment to Israel is an important reason why the United States sees these states as threats in the first place. Indeed, Washington might find it easier to address the various conflicts that it does have with these states were its policies not constrained by the prior commitment to Israel. In any case, these states are at present too weak to harm the United States significantly (though they can certainly make life much more difficult for certain U.S. actions, most notably in Iraq), and Israel has not been much of an asset when America has been forced to take steps against them.
   Even the threat posed by WMD does not provide a compelling reason to support Israel as strongly as the United States currently does. The United States has its own reasons to oppose the spread of WMD in the Middle East (and elsewhere), but it would not be a strategic disaster for the United States if some of these states in this region were eventually to acquire WMD despite our best efforts. Instead, U.S. concerns about Saddam's WMD programs or Iran's current nuclear ambitions derive largely from the threat they are said to pose to Israel. President Bush admitted as much in March 2006, saying, "The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel."83
   Yet given that both Israel and the United States have powerful nuclear forces of their own, this danger is overstated. Attacking the United States or Israel directly is out of the question, because Israel has several hundred weapons of its own and the United States has thousands. If either country were ever attacked, the perpetrator would immediately face a devastating retaliation. Neither country could be blackmailed by a nuclear-armed rogue state, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without facing the same fate. The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, was committed to and guided by a revolutionary ideology, and was governed by ruthless men who placed little value on human life. Yet Moscow could not use its vast arsenal to "blackmail" the United States, and Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev never even tried. The reason is obvious: the United States had its own weapons and could (and would) retaliate in kind.
   The danger that a rogue state might decide to give one of its nuclear weapons to a terrorist group is equally remote, because the country's leaders could never be sure the transfer would remain undetected or that they would
not be blamed and punished afterward. Indeed, giving away the nuclear weapons that they had run grave risks to obtain is probably the last thing such regimes would ever do. They would no longer control how the weapons might be used and they could never be certain that the United States (or Israel) would not incinerate them if either country merely suspected that a particular "rogue state" had provided terrorists with the ability to carry out a WMD attack. If the United States could live with a nuclear Soviet Union or a nuclear China (whose former leaders were among the greatest mass murderers the world has ever known), and if it can tolerate a nuclear Pakistan and embrace a nuclear India, then it could live (however reluctantly) with a nuclear Iran as well.
   It is sometimes said that deterrence cannot work against these regimes, because their leaders (such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) are irrational religious fanatics who would welcome martyrdom and thus could not be effectively deterred. In the words of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, "Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish."84 Disproving such an assertion is impossible, of course, because one can never be 100 percent certain that some world leader might not succumb to suicidal madness. There are nonetheless good reasons to be skeptical of such frightening claims. None of these allegedly irrational leaders could launch a WMD attack by himself; mounting an actual strike would require the active assistance and assent of many other people, all of whom would have to willingly embrace martyrdom themselves. (In Iran, for instance, authority over the military is not even in President Ahmadinejad's hands.) Moreover, there is no evidence suggesting that any of these leaders has ever sought martyrdom (Saddam Hussein certainly didn't, until the noose was nearly around his neck).
   Finally, it is worth noting that such claims have been heard before and turned out to be wrong. U.S. hard-liners once argued that Soviet leaders were ideologically driven and contemptuous of human life and thus might not be deterrable, and other U.S. leaders feared China's acquisition of nuclear weapons because they thought Mao Zedong was an irrational leader who might be willing to risk tens of millions of people in a nuclear exchange. Secretary of State Dean Rusk once warned that "a country whose behavior is as violent, irascible, unyielding, and hostile as that of Communist China is led by leaders whose view of the world and of life itself is unreal," but Chinese nuclear conduct turned out to be quite prudent.85 U.S. leaders should not be complacent about the spread of WMD in the Middle East, but this problem is not a sufficient strategic justification for backing Israel as strongly as the United States currently does.
   Even if Syria or Iran does present challenges for the United States in places like Lebanon or Iraq, or if they either have or want WMD, the U.S. relationship with Israel actually makes it harder to deal effectively with them. Israel's nuclear arsenal is one reason why some of its neighbors want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change has merely reinforced that desire. America's willingness to back Israel in spite of Israel's own nuclear arsenal and its refusal to sign the NPT also makes the United States look hypocritical when it tries to confront would-be proliferators about their own weapons programs. Yet Israel is not much of an asset when Washington contemplates using force against these regimes—as it has done twice in Iraq—because Israel cannot participate in the fight.
   Moreover, the combination of U.S. support for Israel and Israel's continued oppression of the Palestinians has also eroded America's standing in many other quarters and made it more difficult to obtain meaningful cooperation on important strategic issues like the war on terrorism or the related effort to democratize the Middle East. As noted in Chapter 1, foreign populations generally see the United States as "too supportive" of Israel, and many foreign elites think its tacit support for Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories is morally obtuse. In April 2004, for example, fifty-two former British diplomats sent Prime Minister Tony Blair a letter saying that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians had "poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds," and warning that the policies of Bush and Sharon were "one-sided and illegal" and will "cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood." Blair did not really need to be told, however, as he tried repeatedly (though unsuccessfully) to get the Bush administration to engage this issue more seriously. Not to be outdone, a group of eighty-eight former U.S. diplomats quickly followed suit with a similar letter to President Bush.86 Even prominent Israelis such as the veteran military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff understood that "the continuation of this conflict, including the Israeli occupation, will most certainly lead to new waves of terror; international terrorism, which the Americans fear so much, will spread."87
   The consequences of all this became clear in 2006, when U.S. efforts to forge a Sunni coalition to help deal with the deteriorating situation in Iraq and to balance a rising Iran were undermined by Sunni concerns that the United States had consistently taken Israel's side in its conflict with the Palestinians, and their awareness that it would be politically dangerous to get too close to the Americans. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Arab diplomats say countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will find it difficult to publicly stand with the U.S. on
Iran and on broad regional stability unless Washington pressures Israel on a peace initiative." Or as one Arab diplomat put it, "The road to Baghdad runs through Jerusalem, and not the other way around."88 And that is why the bipartisan Iraq Study Group concluded in December 2006 that "the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict."89
   In short, treating Israel as America's most important ally in the campaign against terrorism and against assorted Middle East dictatorships exaggerates Israel's ability to help on these issues, overlooks how the relationship contributes to these problems, and ignores the ways that Israel's policies make U.S. efforts to address them more difficult. Israel's strategic value has declined steadily since the end of the Cold War. Steadfast support for Israel can no longer be justified by the argument that it is helping us defeat a great power rival; instead, backing Israel unconditionally helps make the United States a target for radical extremists and makes America look callous and hypocritical in the eyes of many third parties, including European and Arab allies. The United States still benefits from various acts of strategic cooperation with Israel, but on balance, it is more of a liability than an asset.

A DUBIOUS ALLY

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:19:24 GMT

A DUBIOUS ALLY

A final reason to question Israel's strategic value is that it sometimes does not act like a loyal ally. Like most states, Israel looks first and foremost to its own interests, and it has been willing to do things contrary to American interests when it believed (rightly or wrongly) that doing so would advance its own national goals. In the notorious "Lavon affair" in 1954, for example, Israeli agents tried to bomb several U.S. government offices in Egypt, in a bungled attempt to sow discord between Washington and Cairo. Israel sold military supplies to Iran while U.S. diplomats were being held hostage there in 1979—80, and it was one of Iran's main military suppliers during the Iran-Iraq War, even though the United States was worried about Iran and tacitly backing Iraq. Israel later purchased $36 million worth of Iranian oil in 1989 in an attempt to obtain the release of Israeli hostages in Lebanon. All of these acts made sense from Israel's point of view, but they were contrary to American policy and harmful to overall U.S. interests.90
   In addition to selling weapons to America's enemies, Israel has transferred American technology to third countries, including potential U.S. adversaries like China, actions that violated U.S. laws and threatened American inter
ests. In 1992, the State Department's inspector general reported that starting in 1983 there was evidence of a "systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers" by Israel.91 At about the same time, the General Accounting Office officials looking into the "Dotan affair" (the embezzlement and illegal diversion of millions of dollars of U.S. military aid by the former head of Israeli Air Force procurement) made repeated efforts to meet with Israeli officials to discuss the matter. According to the GAO, "The Government of Israel declined to discuss the issues or allow [U.S.] investigators to question Israeli personnel."92
   Little has changed in recent years. Indeed, even Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense and a consistent supporter of Israel, was reportedly angry when Israel agreed in 2004 to upgrade a killer drone it had sold to China in 1994.93 "Something is going badly wrong in the [U.S.-Israeli] military relationship," said another senior Bush administration official.94
   Amplifying these tensions is the extensive espionage that Israel engages in against the United States. According to the GAO, the Jewish state "conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the United States of any ally."95 Stealing economic secrets gives Israeli firms important advantages over American businesses in the global marketplace and thus imposes additional costs on U.S. citizens.
   More worrying, however, are Israel's continued efforts to steal America's military secrets. This problem is highlighted by the infamous case of Jonathan Pollard, an American intelligence analyst who gave Israel large quantities of highly classified material between 1981 and 1985. After Pollard was caught, the Israelis refused to tell the United States what Pollard gave them.96 The Pollard case is but the most visible tip of a larger iceberg. Israeli agents tried to steal spy-camera technology from a U.S. firm in 1986, and an arbitration panel later accused Israel of "perfidious," "unlawful," and "surreptitious" conduct and ordered it to pay the firm, Recon/Optical Inc., some $3 million in damages. Israeli spies also gained access to confidential U.S. information about a Pentagon electronic intelligence program and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Noel Koch, a senior counterterrorism official in the Defense Department. The Wall Street Journal quoted John Davitt, former head of the Justice Department's internal security section, saying that "those of us who worked in the espionage area regarded Israel as being the second most active foreign intelligence service in the United States."97
   A new controversy erupted in 2004 when a key Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, was arrested on charges of passing classified information regarding U.S. policy toward Iran to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly with the assistance
of two senior AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Franklin eventually accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the affair, and Rosen and Weissman are scheduled to go on trial in the fall of 2007.98
   Israel is of course not the only country that spies on the United States, and Washington conducts extensive espionage against both allies and adversaries as well. Such behavior is neither surprising nor particularly reprehensible, because international politics is a rough business and states often do unscrupulous things in their efforts to gain an edge over other countries. Nonetheless, the close relationship between Washington and Jerusalem has made it easier for Israel to steal American secrets, and it has not hesitated to do just that. At the very least, Israel's willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its overall strategic value, especially now that the Cold War is over.

CONCLUSION

There is no question that Israel has derived substantial benefits from U.S. support, although one might also argue that this support has been used to pursue policies—such as settlement construction—that were not in Israel's long-term interest. It is also clear that the United States derived some strategic value from its aid to Israel, especially during the Cold War. Yet these benefits cannot fully justify or explain why the United States has been willing to give Israel such consistent support over such an extended period. Subsidizing and protecting Israel may have been a net plus for the United States at the height of the Cold War—though even this claim is not open and shut—but that rationale evaporated when the Soviet Union collapsed and the superpower competition in the Middle East ended. Today, America's intimate embrace of Israel—and especially its willingness to subsidize it no matter what its policies are—is not making Americans safer or more prosperous. To the contrary: unconditional support for Israel is undermining relations with other U.S. allies, casting doubt on America's wisdom and moral vision, helping inspire a generation of anti-American extremists, and complicating U.S. efforts to deal with a volatile but vital region. In short, the largely unconditional "special relationship" between the United States and Israel is no longer defensible on strategic grounds. If a convincing rationale is to be found, we must look elsewhere. In the next chapter, we examine the moral case for American support.

A DWINDLING MORAL CASE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:18:32 GMT

A DWINDLING MORAL CASE

When George W. Bush spoke at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in May 2004, he invoked a set of moral themes to help explain U.S. support for Israel. The president began his speech by applauding AIPAC's efforts "to strengthen the ties that bind our nations—our shared values, our strong commitment to freedom." He went on to emphasize that Israel and the United States "have much in common. We're both . . . born of struggle and sacrifice. We're both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution in other lands. We have both built vibrant democracies, built on the rule of law and market economies. And we're both countries founded on certain basic beliefs: that God watches over the affairs of men, and values every life. These ties have made us natural allies, and these ties will never be broken."
   Bush also noted one important difference and drew a moral conclusion from it. Whereas the United States was relatively safe in the past because of its geographical location, "Israel has faced a different situation as a small country in a tough neighborhood. The Israeli people have always had enemies at their borders and terrorists close at hand. Again and again, Israel has defended itself with skill and heroism. And as a result of the courage of the Israeli people, Israel has earned the respect of the American people."1
   Bush's remarks underscore the degree to which U.S. support for Israel is often justified not on strategic grounds but on the basis of essentially moral claims. The moral rationale for American support rests on several distinct lines of argument, and Israel's supporters often invoke one or more of these claims in order to justify the "special relationship." Specifically, Israel is said to deserve generous and nearly unconditional U.S. support because it is
weak and surrounded by enemies dedicated to destroying it; it is a democracy, which is a morally preferable form of government; the Jewish people have suffered greatly from past crimes; Israel's conduct has been morally superior to its adversaries' behavior, especially compared to the Palestinians; the Palestinians rejected the generous peace offer that Israel made at Camp David in July 2000 and opted for violence instead; and it is clear from the Bible that Israel's creation is God's will. Taken together, these arguments underpin the more general claim that Israel is the one country in the Middle East that shares American values and therefore enjoys broad support among the American people. Many U.S. policy makers accept these various arguments, but even if they did not, the American people supposedly want them to back Israel and certainly do not want them to put any pressure on the Jewish state.
   Upon close inspection, the moral rationale for unqualified U.S. support is not compelling. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, but that fortunately is not in danger at present. Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers little moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians or for undertaking policies in the region that are not in America's strategic interest.
   The moral rationale relies heavily on a particular understanding of Israel's history that is widely held by many Americans (both Jews and gentiles). In that story, Jews in the Middle East have long been victims, just as they were in Europe. "The Jew," Elie Wiesel tells us, "has never been an executioner; he is almost always the victim."2 The Arabs, and especially the Palestinians, are the victimizers, bearing a marked similarity to the anti-Semites who persecuted Jews in Europe. This perspective is clearly evident in Leon Uris's famous novel Exodus (1958), which portrays the Jews as both victims and heroes and the Palestinians as villains and cowards. This book sold twenty million copies between 1958 and 1980 and was turned into a popular movie (1960). Scholars have shown that the Exodus narrative has had an enduring influence on how Americans think about the Arab-Israeli conflict.3
   The conventional wisdom about how Israel was created and how it has subsequently behaved toward the Palestinians as well as neighboring states is wrong. It is based on a set of myths about past events that Israeli scholars have systematically demolished over the past twenty years.4 While there is no question that Jews were frequently victims in Europe, in the past century they have often been the victimizers in the Middle East, and their main victims were and continue to be the Palestinians. Not only is the basic point
backed up by an abundance of evidence, but it is also intuitively plausible. After all, how could Jews coming to Palestine from Europe create a state of their own without taking harsh measures against the Arab population that already dwelt in the land they wanted for their new state? Just as the Europeans who created the United States and Canada could not do so without committing significant crimes against the native inhabitants, it was virtually impossible for the Zionists to carve out a Jewish state in Palestine without committing similar crimes against the local residents, who were bound to resent their encroachments and attempt to resist them. Unfortunately, this "new history," as it is called in Israel, has not been adequately acknowledged in the United States, which is one reason why the moral rationale still carries significant weight for many Americans.5
   Israel's more recent conduct is a different matter, however. With the global reach of the Internet and twenty-four-hour cable news networks, many Americans have seen considerable evidence of Israel's brutal treatment of its Palestinian subjects in the Occupied Territories. They have also seen the consequences of Israel's actions in the second Lebanon war (2006), in which the Israel Defense Forces pummeled civilian targets across Lebanon and then dumped several million deadly cluster bomblets in the towns and villages of southern Lebanon.6
   Although these actions have tarnished Israel's public image in the United States, its supporters remain undaunted and continue to make the moral case for sustaining the present relationship between those two countries. In fact, a good case can be made that current U.S. policy conflicts with basic American values and that if the United States were to choose sides on the basis of moral considerations alone, it would back the Palestinians, not Israel. After all, Israel is prosperous and has the most powerful military in the Middle East. No state would deliberately start a war with it today. Israel does have a serious terrorism problem, but that is mainly the consequence of colonizing the Occupied Territories. By contrast, the Palestinians are stateless, impoverished, and facing a deeply uncertain future. Even allowing for the Palestinians' various shortcomings, which group now has the stronger moral claim to U.S. sympathy?
   Getting to the bottom of this issue requires that we look in more detail at the particular arguments that make up the moral rationale. Our focus will be primarily on Israeli behavior, and no attempt will be made to compare it with the actions of other states in the region or in other parts of the world. We are not focusing on Israel's conduct because we have an animus toward the Jewish state, or because we believe that its behavior is particularly worthy of
censure. On the contrary, we recognize that virtually all states have committed serious crimes at one time or another in their history, and we are cognizant of the fact that state building is often a violent enterprise. We are also aware that some of Israel's Arab neighbors have at times acted with great brutality. We focus on Israel's actions because the United States provides it with a level of material and diplomatic support that is substantially greater than what it gives to other states, and it does so at the expense of its own interests. Our aim is to determine whether Israel deserves special treatment because it acts in an exceptionally virtuous manner, as many of its supporters claim. Does Israel behave significantly better than other states do? The historical record suggests that it does not.

BACKING THE UNDERDOG

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:17:28 GMT

BACKING THE UNDERDOG

Israel is often portrayed as weak and besieged, a Jewish David surrounded by a hostile Arab Goliath. This image has been carefully nurtured by Israeli leaders and sympathetic writers, but the opposite is closer to the truth. Israel has always been militarily stronger than its Arab adversaries. Consider Israel's 1948 War of Independence, where the popular belief is that the Zionists—who fought against five Arab armies as well as the Palestinians— were badly outnumbered and outgunned. Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian, refers to this description of the balance of power as "one of the most tenacious myths relating to 1948."7
   One might think that Israeli forces were at a significant quantitative and qualitative disadvantage in 1948, because it was a small new country surrounded by Arab states that had far more people and far greater material resources. In fact, comparing the population size and the resources of Israel and the Arab world tells you little about the balance of military power between them. As Morris notes, "The atlas map showing a minuscule Israel and a giant surrounding Arab sea did not, and, indeed, for the time being, still does not, accurately reflect the true balance of military power in the region. Nor do the comparative population figures; in 1948, the Yishuv [the Jewish settlement in Palestine before Israel was created] numbered some 650,000 souls—as opposed to 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs and some 30 million Arabs in the surrounding states (including Iraq)."8 The reason is simple: the Arab states have been remarkably ineffective at translating those latent resources into actual military power, while Israel, by contrast, has been especially good at doing so.
   The War of Independence was actually two separate conflicts. The first was a civil war between the Jews and the Palestinians, which started on November 29, 1947 (the day of the UN decision to partition Mandate Palestine) and ran until May 14, 1948 (the day Israel declared its independence). The second was an international war between Israel and five Arab armies, which began on May 15, 1948, and ended on January 7, 1949.
   The Zionists won a lopsided victory over the Palestinians in their civil war because they enjoyed a decisive advantage in numbers and quality of both soldiers and weapons.9 Jewish fighting units were far better organized and trained than the Palestinian forces, which had been decimated by the British during the 1936-39 revolt and had not recovered by 1948. As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe notes, "A few thousand irregular Palestinians and Arabs were facing tens of thousands of well-trained Jewish troops."10 Not surprisingly, Israeli leaders were fully aware of this power imbalance and sought to take advantage of it. In fact, Yigal Yadin, a senior military commander in the 1948 war and the IDF's second chief of staff, maintained that if it had not been for the British presence in Palestine until May 1948, "we could have quelled the Arab riot in one month."11
   The Israelis also had a clear advantage in manpower throughout their war with the five Arab armies. Morris notes that when the fighting started in mid-May, Israel "fielded some 35,000 armed troops as compared with the 25-30,000 of the Arab invading armies. By the time of Operation Dani, in July, the IDF had 65,000 men under arms and by December, close to 90,000 men under arms—at each stage significantly outnumbering the combined strength of the Arab armies ranged against them in Palestine."12 Israel also enjoyed an advantage in weaponry, save for a brief twenty-five days at the start of that conflict (May 15-June 10, 1948). Moreover, with the possible exception of Transjordan's small Arab Legion, the quality of the Israeli fighting forces was far superior to their Arab adversaries and they were much better organized as well. In short, the Zionists won the civil war against the Palestinians and the international war against the invading Arab armies because they were more powerful than their adversaries, despite the absolute advantage in population that their Arab foes enjoyed. As Morris notes, "It was superior Jewish firepower, manpower, organization, and command and control that determined the outcome of battle."13
   The IDF won quick and decisive victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967—before large-scale U.S. aid began flowing to Israel. In October 1973, Israel was a victim of a stunning surprise attack by the Egyptian and Syrian armies. Although an outnumbered IDF
suffered serious setbacks in the first days of fighting, it quickly recovered and was on the verge of destroying the Egyptian and Syrian armies when the United States and the Soviet Union intervened to halt the fighting. The remarkable turnaround, according to Morris, was due to the fact that "the IDF's machines, both in the air and on the ground, were simply superior. So was its manpower: Israeli pilots, maintenance and ground control staffs, tank officers, and men were far better trained and led than their Arab counterparts."14 These victories offer eloquent evidence of Israeli patriotism, organizational ability, and military prowess, but they also reveal that Israel was far from helpless even in its earliest years.15
   Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbors, and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so as well. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been decimated by three disastrous wars, and Iran is hundreds of miles away and has never directly attacked Israel. The Palestinians barely have effective police, let alone a military that could threaten Israel's existence, and they are further weakened by profound internal divisions. The deaths caused by Palestinian suicide bombers are tragic and strike fear in the hearts of all Israelis, but they do relatively little damage to Israel's economy, much less threaten its territorial integrity.16 Groups like Hezbollah can launch low-yield missiles and rockets at Israel and might be able to kill a few hundred Israelis over the course of months or years, but these attacks do not represent an existential threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University's prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, "The strategic balance decidedly favors Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbors."17 If backing the underdog were a compelling rationale, the United States would be supporting Israel's opponents.
   Of course, there is another dimension to the argument that Israel has long been under siege and is always the victim: the claim that despite Israel's military superiority, its Arab neighbors are determined to destroy it. Indeed, some argue that the Arabs precipitated wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973 in order "to drive the Jews into the Sea."18
   While there is no question that Israel faced serious threats in its early years, the Arabs were not attempting to destroy Israel in any of those three wars. This is not because the Arabs were happy about the presence of a Jewish state in their midst—they clearly were not—but rather because they have
never had the capability to win a war against Israel, much less defeat it decisively. There is no question that some Arab leaders talked about "driving the Jews into the Sea" during the 1948 war, but this was largely rhetoric designed to appease their publics. In fact, the Arab leaders were mainly concerned with gaining territory for themselves at the expense of the Palestinians, one of the many occasions when Arab governments put their own interests ahead of the Palestinians' welfare. Morris, for example, writes:

What ensued, once Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and the Arab states invaded on 15 May, was "a general land grab," with everyone—Israel, Transjordan, Syria, Egypt, and even Lebanon—bent on preventing the birth of a Palestinian Arab state and carving out chunks of Palestine for themselves. Contrary to the old historiography, Abdullah's [king of Transjordan] invasion of eastern Palestine was clearly designed to conquer territory for his kingdom—at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs—rather than to destroy the Jewish state. Indeed, the Arab Legion stuck meticulously, throughout the war, to its non-aggressive stance vis-a-vis the Yishuv and the Jewish state's territory ... It is not at all clear that Abdullah and Glubb [the British general who commanded Transjordan's Arab Legion] would have been happy to see the collapse in May 1948 of the fledgling Jewish republic. Certainly Abdullah was far more troubled by the prospects of the emergence of a Palestinian Arab state and of an expanded Syria and an expanded Egypt on his frontiers than by the emergence of a small Jewish state.19

And Abdullah, as Morris notes, was the only Arab leader who "committed the full weight" of his military power to attacking Israel, "indicating either inefficiency or, perhaps, a less than wholehearted seriousness about the declared aim of driving the Jews into the sea." Shlomo Ben-Ami, a noted historian and a former Israeli foreign minister, has a similar view of Arab goals in the 1948 war: "111 prepared and poorly co-ordinated, the Arab armies were dragged into the war by popular pressure in their home states, and because their leaders each had his own agenda of territorial expansion. Securing the establishment of a Palestinian state . . . was less of a motive for the Arab leaders who sent their armies to Palestine than establishing their own territorial claims or thwarting those of their rivals in the Arab coalition."20
   The myth of Israel as a victim is also reflected in the conventional wisdom about the 1967 war, which claims that Egypt and Syria are principally re
sponsible for starting it. In particular, the Arabs are said to have been preparing to attack Israel when the IDF beat them to the punch and scored a stunning victory.21 It is clear from the release of new documents about the war, however, that the Arabs did not intend to initiate a war against Israel in the late spring of 1967, much less try to destroy the Jewish state.22 Avi Shlaim, a distinguished Israeli "new historian," writes, "There is general agreement among commentators that [Egyptian President] Nasser neither wanted nor planned to go to war with Israel."23 In fact, Israel bears considerable responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Shlaim writes that "Israel's strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967, despite the conventional wisdom on the subject that singles out Syrian aggression as the principal cause of war."24 Ben-Ami goes even farther, writing that Yitzhak Rabin, the IDF chief of staff, "intentionally led Israel into a war with Syria. Rabin was determined to provoke a war with Syria . . . because he thought this was the only way to stop the Syrians from supporting Fatah attacks against Israel."25
   None of this is to deny that Egypt's decision in May 1967 to close the Straits of Tiran was a legitimate cause of concern to Israel. But it was not a harbinger of an imminent Egyptian attack, and that point was recognized by American policy makers and many Israeli leaders. Serious diplomatic efforts were also under way to solve the crisis peacefully. Yet Israel chose to attack anyway, because its leaders ultimately preferred war to a peaceful resolution of the crisis. In particular, Israel's military commanders wanted to inflict significant military defeats on their two main adversaries—Egypt and Syria— in order to strengthen Israeli deterrence over the long term.26 Some also had territorial ambitions. General Ezer Weizman, the IDF's chief of operations, reflected this sentiment when he said on the eve of the war, "We are on the brink of a second War of Independence, with all its accomplishments."27 In short, Israel was not preempting an impending attack when it struck the first blow on June 5, 1967. Instead, it was launching a preventive war—a war aimed at affecting the balance of power over time—or, as Menachem Begin put it, a "war of choice." In his words, "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him [Egyptian President Nasser]."28
   The Egyptians and the Syrians certainly did attack Israel in October 1973, but it is a well-established fact that both Arab armies were pursuing a limited aims strategy. The Egyptians hoped to conquer a slice of territory in the Sinai Peninsula and then bargain with Israel for the return of the rest of the Sinai, while the Syrians hoped to recapture the Golan Heights. Neither the Egyptians nor the Syrians intended to invade Israel, much less
threaten its existence. Not only did Israel have the most formidable army in the region, but it also had nuclear weapons, which would have made any attempt to conquer it suicidal. Benny Morris puts the point well: "Presidents Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Hafez Assad of Syria sought to regain the territories lost in 1967. Neither aimed to destroy Israel."29 In fact, key decision makers in both Cairo and Damascus recognized that they were pursuing an especially risky strategy by picking a fight with the mighty IDF. General Hassan el Badri, who helped plan the Egyptian attack, remarked that "it almost seemed that success would be impossible."30 And these doubters were correct, because the IDF, after recovering from the initial attack, routed both Arab armies.
   With the possible exception of Iran, it is hard to make the case today that Israel's neighbors are bent on destroying it. As noted, Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and, as will be discussed in Chapter 9, Israel walked away from a possible peace treaty with Syria in 2000. At an Arab summit in March 2002, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia attempted to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting forward a proposal calling for full recognition of Israel by virtually every Arab government and normalization of relations with the Jewish state. In return, Israel would have to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and work toward a fair solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. The initiative was unanimously endorsed by the Arab League. Even Saddam Hussein backed it.31 The proposal went nowhere at the time, but the Saudis resurrected it in early 2007. There is certainly no evidence that post-Saddam Iraq is interested in destroying Israel. While Hamas and Hezbollah may reject Israel's existence and inflict suffering, they do not, as noted, have the capability to pose a mortal danger. Iran would obviously be a serious threat to Israel if it acquired nuclear weapons, but as long as Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, Iran cannot attack it without being destroyed itself.

AIDING A FELLOW DEMOCRACY

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:16:28 GMT

AIDING A FELLOW DEMOCRACY

American backing is often justified by the claim that Israel is a fellow democracy. Indeed, its defenders frequently remind Americans that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and that it is surrounded by hostile dictatorships. This rationale sounds convincing, but it cannot account for the current level of U.S. support. After all, there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the level of unconditional aid that Israel does.
   In fact, whether a country is democratic is not a reliable indicator of how Washington will relate to it. The United States has overthrown a few democratic governments in the past and has supported numerous dictators when doing so was thought to advance U.S. interests. The Eisenhower administration overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, while the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Today, the Bush administration has good relations with dictators like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, and at the same time it has worked to undermine the democratically elected Hamas government in the Occupied Territories. It also has an acrimonious relationship with Hugo Chavez, the elected leader of Venezuela. Being democratic neither justifies nor fully explains the extent of American support for Israel.
   The "shared democracy" rationale is also weakened by aspects of Israeli democracy that are at odds with core American values. The United States is a liberal democracy where people of any race, religion, or ethnicity are supposed to enjoy equal rights. While Israel's citizens are of many backgrounds, including Arab, Muslim, and Christian, among others, it was explicitly founded as a Jewish state, and whether a citizen is regarded as Jewish ordinarily depends on kinship (verifiable Jewish ancestry).32 Israel's Jewish character is clearly reflected in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, which was officially proclaimed on May 14, 1948. It explicitly refers to the United Nations' recognition "of the right of the Jewish people to establish their state," openly proclaims "the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel," and later describes the new state as "the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land."33
   Given Israel's Jewish character, its leaders have long emphasized the importance of maintaining an unchallenged Jewish majority within its borders. Israelis worry a great deal about the flow of Jews and Palestinians into and out of Israel, the relative birthrates of Palestinians and Jews, and the possibility that expanding Israel's borders beyond the pre-1967 lines might result in many more Arabs living in their midst. David Ben-Gurion, for example, proclaimed that "any Jewish woman who, as far as it depends on her, does not bring into the world at least four healthy children is shirking her duty to the nation, like a soldier who evades military service."34 There are now about 5.3 million Jews and 1.36 million Arabs living in Israel, including the disputed area of East Jerusalem. There are another 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which means that there are only about 140,000 more Jews than Palestinians living in what used to be called Mandate Palestine, and by almost all accounts the Palestinians have a higher birthrate than
the Jews.35 It is not surprising, in light of these numbers, that it is commonplace these days for Israeli Jews to talk about their fellow Arab citizens and Palestinian subjects as a potential "demographic threat."36
   One might think that although Israel is a Jewish state at its core, its Basic Laws (there are eleven) still guarantee equal rights for all its citizens, Arabs or Jews. But that is not the case. The initial draft of the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, which approximates the U.S. Bill of Rights, contained language that promised equality for all Israelis: "All are equal before the law, and there shall be no discrimination on the grounds of gender, religion, nationality, race, ethnic group, country of origin or any other irrelevant factor."37 Ultimately, however, a Knesset committee removed that clause from the final version that became law in 1992. Since then, Arab members of Israel's Knesset have made numerous attempts to amend that Basic Law by adding language that provides for equality before the law. But their Jewish colleagues have refused to go along, a situation that stands in marked contrast to the United States, where the equality principle is enshrined in law.38
   In addition to Israel's commitment to maintaining its Jewish identity and its refusal to grant de jure equality for non-Jews, Israel's 1.36 million Arabs are de facto treated as second-class citizens. An Israeli government commission found in 2003, for example, that Israel behaves in a "neglectful and discriminatory" manner toward them.39 Indeed, there is widespread support among Israeli Jews for this unequal treatment of Israeli Arabs. A poll released in March 2007 found that 55 percent of Israeli Jews wanted segregated entertainment facilities, while more than 75 percent said they would not live in the same building as an Israeli Arab. More than half of the respondents said that for a Jewish woman to marry an Arab is equal to national treason, and 50 percent said that they would refuse employment if their immediate supervisor was an Arab.40 The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 53 percent of Israeli Jews "are against full equality for the Arabs," while 77 percent of Israeli Jews believe that "there should be a Jewish majority on crucial political decisions." Only 31 percent "support having Arab political parties in the government."41 That sentiment squares with the fact that Israel did not appoint its first Muslim Arab cabinet minister until January 2007, almost six decades after the founding of the state. And even that one appointment, which was to the minor portfolio of science, sports, and culture, was highly controversial.42
   Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens is more than just discriminatory. For example, to limit the number of Arabs in its midst, Israel does not permit
Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens to become citizens themselves and does not give these spouses the right to live in Israel. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem called this restriction "a racist law that determines who can live here according to racist criteria."43 Also, the Olmert government is pushing—and the Knesset's ministerial committee on legislation approved on January 10, 2007—a law that would allow the courts to revoke the citizenship of "unpatriotic" citizens. This legislation, which is clearly aimed at Israeli Arabs, was labeled "a drastic and extreme move that harms civil liberties" by Israel's attorney general.44 Such laws may be understandable in light of Israel's founding principles—the explicit aim of creating a Jewish state—but they are not consistent with America's image of a multiethnic democracy in which all citizens are supposed to be treated equally regardless of their ancestry.
   In early 2007, Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to ultra-Orthodox Israelis with large families for the hardships that were caused by welfare cuts that he had made in 2002 when he was finance minister. He noted, however, that there was at least one important and unexpected benefit of these cuts: "there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate" within the "non-Jewish public."45 For Netanyahu, like many Israelis who are deeply worried about the so-called Arab demographic threat, the fewer Israeli Arab births, the better.
   Netanyahu's comments would almost certainly be condemned if made in the United States. Imagine the outcry that would arise here if a U.S. cabinet official spoke of the benefits of a policy that had reduced the birthrates of African Americans and Hispanics, thereby preserving a white majority. But such statements are not unusual in Israel, where important leaders have a history of making derogatory comments about Palestinians and are rarely sanctioned for them. Menachem Begin once said that "Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs," while former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan referred to them as "drugged roaches in a bottle" and also said that "a good Arab is a dead Arab." Another former chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, referred to the Palestinian threat as like a "cancer" on which he was performing "chemotherapy. "46
   Such discriminatory views are not restricted to Israeli leaders. In a recent survey of Jewish high school students in Israel, 75 percent of the respondents said that Arabs are "uneducated." The same percentage said that they are "uncivilized," while 74 percent of those polled said that Arabs are "unclean." Commenting on this last finding, Larry Derfner wrote in the Jerusalem Post: "To say Arabs are unclean is not a hard-line political statement. It's not an unduly harsh comment on Arab behavior. To say Arabs are un
clean is to evince an irrational, hysterical, impenetrable, absolute hatred for an entire ethnic group—which, in fact, happens not to be unclean, no more than Jews are. To say Arabs are unclean is an expression of racism in about its purest, most virulent form." The person who oversaw the survey said, "We were not surprised by the outcome of the research. Anyone who is familiar with the field knows that these warped perceptions exist, but these findings are at the most severe extreme of a disturbing phenomenon." It is noteworthy that the same survey polled Israeli Arab youth as well, and Derfner reports that "while their attitudes toward Jews are awful, they're considerably less awful than the Jewish students' attitudes toward them."47 These hostile attitudes toward Israeli Arabs, coupled with fears about a "demographic threat" and the desire to maintain a Jewish majority, have led to considerable support among Israeli Jews for expelling or "transferring" much of the Arab population from Israel. Indeed, Avigdor Lieberman, who was appointed deputy prime minister for strategic threats in 2006, has made it clear that he favors expulsion, so as to make Israel "as much as possible" a homogeneous Jewish state. Specifically, he advocates trading portions of Israel that are densely packed with Arabs for areas of the West Bank that contain Jewish settlers. He is not the first Israeli cabinet minister to advocate expulsion.48
   Although he is a controversial figure, Lieberman is not an outlier in Israel on this issue. The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 57 percent of Israel's Jews "think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate." A 2004 survey conducted by Haifa University's Center for the Study of National Security found that the number had increased to 63.7 percent. One year later, in 2005, the Palestinian Center for Israel Studies found that 42 percent of Israeli Jews believed that their government should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave, while another 17 percent tended to agree with the idea. The following year, the Center for Combating Racism found that 40 percent of Israel's Jews wanted their leaders to encourage the Arab population to emigrate, while the Israel Democracy Institute found the number to be 62 percent.49 If 40 percent or more of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians "should be encouraged" to leave the United States, it would surely prompt vehement criticism.
   These attitudes are perhaps to be expected, given the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and the considerable suffering it has produced on both sides. They are also no worse than the attitudes that many Americans had for different minority groups (especially African Americans) throughout much of American history. Yet whatever their origins, they are
clearly attitudes that would now earn widespread condemnation here in the United States, if their existence were more widely known, and they pose a serious challenge to cliches about "our shared values, our strong commitment to freedom."
   Finally, Israel's democratic status is undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own and by its continued imposition of a legal, administrative, and military regime in the Occupied Territories that denies them basic human rights. Israel at present controls the lives of about 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while colonizing lands on which they have long dwelt. Israel formally withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005 but continues to maintain substantial control over its residents.50 Specifically, Israel controls air, sea, and land access, which means that the Palestinians are effectively prisoners within Gaza, able to enter or leave only with Israeli approval. Jan Egeland, a senior UN figure, and Jan Eliasson, the Swedish foreign minister, wrote in September 2006 that the Palestinians are "living in a cage," which naturally has had devastating effects on their economy, as well as their mental and physical well-being.51
   On the West Bank, Israel continues to expropriate Palestinian land and build settlements. The situation was succinctly described in a Ha'aretz editorial in late December 2006: "Virtually not a week goes by without a new revelation, each more sensational and revolting than the previous one, about the building spree in West Bank settlements, in blatant violation of the law and in complete contradiction to official government policy."52 Indeed, the Israeli organization Peace Now recently released a study based on Israeli government records, which shows that more than 32 percent of the land that Israel holds for the purpose of building settlements is privately owned by Palestinians. Israel intends to keep almost all of this land forever. This seizure of Palestinian property violates not only Israeli law but also a fundamental principle of democracy: the protection of private property.53
   In sum, Israel has a vibrant democratic order for its Jewish citizens, who can and do criticize their government and choose their leaders in open and free elections. Freedom of the press is also alive and well in Israel, where, paradoxically, it is much easier to criticize Israeli policy than it is in the United States. This is why so much of the evidence in this study is drawn from the Israeli press. Despite these positive features, Arab Israelis are systematically marginalized, the millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are denied full political rights, and the "shared democracy" rationale is correspondingly weakened.

COMPENSATION FOR PAST CRIMES

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:15:31 GMT

COMPENSATION FOR PAST CRIMES

A third moral justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially the tragic experience of the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and many believe they can be safe only in a Jewish homeland, Israel is said to deserve special treatment. This view formed the basis for the original Zionist program, played an important role in convincing the United States and other countries to back Israel's founding, and continues to resonate today.
   There is no question that Jews suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of anti-Semitism and that Israel's creation was an appropriate response to a long record of crimes. This history provides a strong moral case for supporting Israel's founding and continued existence. This backing is also consistent with America's general commitment to national self-determination. But one cannot ignore the fact that the creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians. Crimes against Jews justify backing Israel's existence, but its crimes against Palestinians undermine its claim to special treatment.
   The history of these events is well documented. When political Zionism began in earnest in the late nineteenth century, there were only about fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand Jews living in Palestine.54 In 1893, for example, the Arabs comprised roughly 95 percent of the population, and though under Ottoman control, they had been in continuous possession of this territory for thirteen hundred years.55 The old Zionist adage that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without a land" was dead wrong regarding the land; it was occupied by another people.56
   The early Zionists hoped that the waves of Jews who began leaving Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century would come to Palestine, allowing the Jews to gain a decisive numerical advantage over the Arabs there. But that did not happen, mainly because most of these Jews preferred to go to the United States. Only one hundred thousand of the four million Jews who left Europe between 1880 and 1920 went to Palestine.57 In fact, until Hitler came to power, the Jews in Palestine could not fill "the generous immigration quotas allowed by the British."58 In 1948, when Israel was founded, its 650,000 Jews were only about 35 percent of Palestine's population and they owned only 7 percent of its land.59
   From the start, the leading Zionists were determined to create a Jewish state that covered virtually all of Palestine, and even parts of Lebanon and Syria.60 Of course, there were differences among them on where they
thought the borders should be drawn in an ideal world, and almost all recognized that it might not be possible to realize all of their territorial ambitions. The mainstream Zionist leadership, it should be emphasized, was never interested in establishing a binational state where Arabs and Jews lived side by side in a country that had no religious identity and might even have more Arabs than Jews. The goal from the beginning was to create instead a Jewish state in which Jews comprised at least 85 percent of the population.61
   The Zionists' ambitions also went beyond a permanent partition of Palestine. It is widely believed in the United States, especially among Israel's supporters, that the Zionists were willing to agree to a permanently partitioned Palestine, and indeed they did agree to the partition plans put forward by Britain's Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN in 1947. But their acceptance of these plans did not mean that they intended to accept only part of Palestine in perpetuity, or that they were willing to support the creation of a Palestinian state. As recent scholarship makes abundantly clear, the Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a tactical maneuver and not their real objective. They had no intention of coexisting alongside a viable Palestinian state over the long run, as that outcome was in direct conflict with their dream of creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
   There was fierce opposition among the Zionists to the Peel Commission's partition plan, and their leader, David Ben-Gurion, was barely able to get his fellow Zionists to accept it. They eventually agreed to the proposal, however, because they recognized that Ben-Gurion intended eventually to take all of the land of Palestine. The Zionist leader made this point clearly in the summer of 1937 when he told the Zionist Executive, "After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." Similarly, he told his son Amos that same year, "Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come."62
   The Peel Commission's plan went nowhere in 1937, and over the course of the ensuing decade the Zionists remained committed to incorporating all of Mandate Palestine into a future Jewish state. Ben-Gurion made a number of comments in the first half of 1947 that show he still wanted all of Palestine. For example, the Israeli scholar Uri Ben-Eliezer reports:

On May 13, 1947, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive which was held in the United States: "We want the Land of Israel in its entirety. That was the original intention." A week later,
speaking to the Elected Assembly in Jerusalem, the leader of the Yishuv wondered: "Does anyone among us disagree that the original intention of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, and the original intention of the hopes harbored by generations of the Jewish people, was finally to establish a Jewish state in the whole Land of Israel?" Speaking to the Mapai Secretariat in June, Ben-Gurion stated that it would be a mistake to forgo any part of the land. We have no right to do that, he said, and there is no need for it.63

   Later that year, in November, the UN devised a new plan to partition Palestine between the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs. The Zionists publicly accepted this plan as well. But in fact Ben-Gurion had already negotiated a deal with King Abdullah of Transjordan to divide up Palestine between Israel and Transjordan and deny the Palestinians a state.64 This secret arrangement, which Britain endorsed, allowed Transjordan to acquire the West Bank and Israel to take what it could of the rest of Palestine. The deal was ultimately implemented during the 1948 war, although in a somewhat disjointed fashion. Israeli leaders, not surprisingly, gave serious thought during the war to conquering the West Bank and taking all of Mandate Palestine for their new state, but they decided that the likely costs outweighed the potential benefits. Transjordan, which later became Jordan, controlled the West Bank until the 1967 Six-Day War, when the IDF conquered it. In short, Israel's founding fathers were determined from the beginning to create a "greater Israel," which left no room for a Palestinian state and little room for Palestinians inside the Jewish state.
   Given that Arabs heavily outnumbered Jews in Palestine and that the Zionists were bent on conquering as much territory as feasible, they had little choice but to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was no other way to accomplish their objective, as the Arabs were hardly likely to give up their land voluntarily. This is why the Peel Commission's plan to partition Palestine called explicitly for population transfer. It is also why the UN partition plan, which called for establishing an Israel that was 55 percent Jewish and 45 percent Arab, was unworkable.65 There was certainly no way that a Jewish state could be created in all of Palestine without convincing large numbers of Arabs to leave.
   In light of these realities, expulsion was a frequent topic of conversation among Zionists since the earliest days of the movement, and it was widely recognized as the only realistic way to solve the demographic problem that stood in the way of creating a Jewish state.66 Ben-Gurion saw the problem
clearly, writing in 1941 that "it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion."67 Or as he wrote his son in October 1937, "We shall organize a modern defense force . . . and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means."68 No doubt he would have preferred to do so via "mutual agreement," but Ben-Gurion understood that this was a remote possibility and that the Zionists would need a strong army to accomplish their aims. Morris puts the point succinctly: "Of course, Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. . . Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."69
   Expulsion is a horrible and controversial strategy and it makes no sense for any group contemplating the transfer of a rival population to announce its intentions to the world. Thus, after commenting in 1941 that he could not imagine how transfer could be accomplished without "brutal compulsion," Ben-Gurion went on to say that the Zionists should not "discourage other people, British or American, who favour transfer from advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our programme."70 He was not rejecting this policy, however; he was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly proclaim it. Further reflecting how "highly sensitive" the subject of transfer was to Israel's founding fathers, Benny Morris notes that "it was common practice in Zionist bodies to order stenographers to 'take a break' and thus to exclude from the record discussion on such matters." Moreover, he notes that "Jewish press reports" describing how Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders reacted to the Peel Commission's plan for partitioning Palestine "generally failed to mention that Ben-Gurion, or anyone else, had come out strongly in favor of transfer or indeed had even raised the subject."71
   The opportunity to expel the Palestinians and create a Jewish state came in 1948, when Jewish forces drove up to seven hundred thousand Palestinians into exile.72 Israelis and their supporters in the United States long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but scholars have demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee.73 After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles. As Ben-Gurion put it in June 1948, "We must prevent
at all costs their return."74 By 1962, Israel owned almost 93 percent of the land inside its borders.75 To achieve this outcome, 531 Arab villages were destroyed "and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants."76 Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan captures the catastrophe that the Zionists inflicted on the Palestinians to create the state of Israel: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either . . . There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."77
   The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a grave injustice against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel's leaders. As Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, in 1956, "If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"78
   Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right, made essentially the same point when he wrote in 1923, "Colonization is self-explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country's Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it."79 Berl Katznelson, a close ally of Ben-Gurion and a leading intellectual force among the early Zionists, put the point bluntly: "The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest."80
   In the six decades since Israel was created, its leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions.81 Prime Minister Golda Meir, for example, famously remarked that "there was no such thing as a Palestinian."82 Many Israeli leaders also maintained a deep interest in incorporating the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. In 1949, for example, Moshe Dayan proclaimed that Israel's boundaries were "ridiculous from all points of view." Israel's eastern border, he felt, should be the Jordan River. Dayan was no exception in this regard; many of his fellow generals as well as Ben-Gurion himself were keen on acquiring the West Bank for Israel.83 Benny Morris is certainly correct when he notes that "the vision of 'Greater Israel' as Zionism's ultimate objective did not end with the 1948 war."84
   After the start of the First Intifada in December 1987, some Israeli leaders began to countenance giving the Palestinians limited autonomy in particular areas of the West Bank and Gaza. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, is often said to have been willing to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state in almost all of the Occupied Territories. But this view is not correct; Rabin in fact opposed creating a full-fledged Palestinian state. Speaking in 1995, the year that he was murdered, Rabin said, "I seek peaceful coexistence between Israel as a Jewish state, not all over the land of Israel, or most of it; its capital, the united Jerusalem; its security border with Jordan rebuilt; next to it, a Palestinian entity, less than a state, that runs the life of Palestinians . . . This is my goal, not to return to the pre—Six-Day War lines but to create two entities, a separation between Israel and the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."85
   The depth of Israel's opposition to creating a Palestinian state—even in the late 1990s—is reflected in an incident involving First Lady Hillary Clinton. In the spring of 1998, Israelis and their American supporters sharply criticized her for saying that "it would be in the long-term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine, a functioning modern state that is on the same footing as other states." White House officials, according to the New York Times, immediately "disowned" her comments and "insisted that she was speaking only for herself." Her view, the White House press secretary said, "is not the view of the President."86
   By 2000, however, it was finally acceptable for American politicians to speak openly about the desirability of a Palestinian state. At the same time, pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced recent Israeli leaders to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip and to explore territorial compromises involving the West Bank. Still, no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. As discussed below, even Prime Minister Ehud Barak's purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would have given the Palestinians only a disarmed and dismembered state under de facto Israeli control. In 2002, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir reiterated his opposition to giving the Palestinians any kind of state, while former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear the following year that he favored only a semisovereign Palestinian state.87
   Europe's crimes against the Jews provide a strong moral justification for Israel's right to exist. No new settler state can hope to come into existence without some degree of violence, but Israel has continued to impose terrible violence and discrimination on the Palestinians for decades. These policies
can no longer be justified on the grounds that the existence of Israel is at stake. Israel's survival is not in doubt, even if some Islamic extremists harbor unrealistic hopes or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Israel "should vanish from the page of time."88 More important, the past suffering of the Jewish people does not obligate the United States to help Israel no matter what it does today.

"VIRTUOUS ISRAELIS" VERSUS "EVIL ARABS"

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:12:26 GMT

"VIRTUOUS ISRAELIS" VERSUS "EVIL ARABS"

Another moral argument portrays Israel as a country that has sought peace at every turn and showed great and noble restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with deep wickedness and indiscriminate violence. This narrative is endlessly repeated by Israeli leaders and by American apologists for Israel such as Alan Dershowitz and the New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz. Israel, according to Peretz, adheres closely to a doctrine called "purity of arms," which means that "everything reasonable must be done to avoid harming civilians, even if that entails additional risks to Israeli soldiers." Moreover, he maintains that "Israel has for years vacillated between responding to terror with exquisitely calibrated force and pacifying terrorists by giving them some of what they want," while its Arab enemies are part "of the very same terror that was launched on us on Sept. 11."89 The IDF, according to Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, among others, "is the most moral army in the world."90 This description of Israeli behavior is yet another myth, another element in what Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, calls Israel's "sacred narrative."91
   Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent toward the Palestinian Arabs.92 The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists' encroachments, sometimes killing Jews and destroying their homes. But this resistance would be expected given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. "Were I an Arab," Ben-Gurion candidly remarked in June 1937, "I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule."93 The Zionists responded vigorously and often ruthlessly, and thus neither side owns the moral high ground during this period.
   This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1948 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.94 Of course, Zionist leaders did not tell their troops to
murder and rape Palestinians, but they did advocate using brutal methods to remove huge numbers of Palestinians from the land that would soon be the new Jewish state. Consider what Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on January 1, 1948, at a time when he was involved in a series of important meetings with other Zionist leaders about how to deal with the Palestinians in their midst: "There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family—we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction . . . There is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty."95 It is hardly surprising that this sort of guidance from the Zionist leadership—Ben-Gurion was summarizing the emerging policy—led Jewish soldiers to commit atrocities. After all, we have seen this pattern of behavior in many wars, fought by many different peoples. Regardless, the occurrence of atrocities in this period undercuts Israel's claim to a special moral status.
   Israel's subsequent conduct toward its Arab adversaries and its Palestinian subjects has often been severe, belying any claim to morally superior conduct. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Morris estimates that "Israeli security forces and civilian guards, and their mines and booby-traps, killed somewhere between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators." Some of them were undoubtedly bent on killing Israelis, but according to the available evidence, "the vast majority of those killed were unarmed; the overwhelming majority had infiltrated for economic or social reasons." Morris notes that this "free-fire" policy led to "a series of atrocities" against the infiltrators.96
   These kinds of acts were not anomalous. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.97 In 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.98 When the victims of these ethnic cleansings tried to sneak back to their homes, often unarmed, Israelis sometimes shot them on sight.99 Amnesty International estimates that between 1967 and 2003, Israel destroyed more than ten thousand homes in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.100 Israel was also complicit in the massacre of innocent Palestinians by a Christian militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. An Israeli investigatory commission found Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to bear "personal responsibility" for these atrocities by allowing the Phalangists to enter the camps.101 While the commission's willingness to hold a top official like Sharon accountable is admirable, we should not forget that Israeli voters subsequently elected him prime minister.
   Israel has now controlled the West Bank and Gaza for forty years, making it, as the historian Perry Anderson notes, "the longest official military occupation of modern history."102 When the occupation began, Benny Morris explains, Israelis "liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an 'enlightened' and 'benign' occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation."103 During the First Intifada (1987-91), for example, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protestors. The Swedish branch of the Save the Children organization released a thousand-page report in May 1990 that detailed the effects of that conflict on the children in the Occupied Territories. It estimated that "23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the [first] intifada." Moreover, it estimated that almost one-third of the children were ten years or under; one-fifth were five and under; more than four-fifths "had been beaten on their heads and upper bodies and at multiple locations"; and almost one-third of the children "sustained broken bones, including multiple fractures."104
   Ehud Barak, the IDF's deputy chief of staff during the First Intifada, said at the time, "We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances . . . When you see a child you don't shoot." Nevertheless, Save the Children estimated that sixty-five hundred to eighty-five hundred children were wounded by gunfire during the first two years of the Intifada. Regarding the 106 recorded cases of "child gunshot deaths," the report concluded that almost all of them "were hit by directed—not random or ricochet— gunfire"; almost 20 percent suffered multiple gunshot wounds; about 12 percent were shot from behind; 15 percent of the children were ten years or younger; "most children were not participating in a stone-throwing demonstration when shot"; and "nearly one-fifth of the children were shot dead while at home or within ten meters of their homes."
   Israel's response to the Second Intifada (2000-05) was even more violent, leading the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz to declare that "the IDF ... is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking."105 The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising, which is hardly a measured response.106 Over the course of that uprising, Israel killed 3,386 Palestinians, while 992 Israelis were killed by the Palestinians, which means that Israel killed 3.4 Palestinians for every Israeli lost.
Among those killed were 676 Palestinian children and 118 Israeli children; thus, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed was 5.7 to 1. Of the 3,386 Palestinian deaths, 1,815 were believed to be bystanders, 1,008 were killed while fighting the Israelis, and the circumstances of 563 deaths are unknown. In other words, well over half of the Palestinian fatalities appear to have been noncombatants. A similar pattern holds on the Israeli side, where 683 of its 992 deaths were civilians; the remaining 309 were military.107 Israeli forces have also killed several foreign peace activists, including a twenty-three-year-old American woman crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003.108 Yet the Israeli government rarely investigates these civilian deaths, much less punishes the perpetrators.109
   These facts about Israel's conduct have been amply documented by numerous human rights organizations—including prominent Israeli groups— and are not disputed by fair-minded observers.110 And that is why four former officials of Shin Bet (the Israeli domestic security organization) condemned Israel's conduct during the Second Intifada in November 2003. One of them declared, "We are behaving disgracefully," and another termed Israel's conduct "patently immoral."111
   A similar pattern can be seen in Israel's response to the escalation in violence in Gaza and Lebanon in 2006.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:11:27 GMT

A similar pattern can be seen in Israel's response to the escalation in violence in Gaza and Lebanon in 2006. The killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third by Hamas in June 2006 led Israel to reoccupy Gaza and launch air strikes and artillery fire that destroyed critical infrastructure, including the electric power station that provided residents of Gaza with half of their electricity. The IDF has also killed hundreds of Palestinians since moving back into Gaza, many of them children.112 This dire situation led the UN high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, to proclaim in November 2006 that "the violation of human rights in this territory ... is massive."113 Likewise, when Hezbollah units crossed the Israeli-Lebanese border in July 2006 and captured two IDF soldiers and killed several more, Israel unleashed a bombing campaign that was designed to inflict massive punishment on Lebanon's civilian population by destroying critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, gas stations, and buildings. More than one thousand Lebanese died, most of them innocent civilians. As discussed in Chapter 11, this response was both strategically foolish and a violation of the laws of war. In short, there is little basis for the often-heard claim that Israel has consistently shown great restraint in dealing with its adversaries.
   An obvious challenge to this point is the claim that Israel has faced a mortal threat throughout its history, both from "rejectionist" Arab governments and from Palestinian terrorists. Isn't Israel entitled to do whatever it
takes to protect its citizens? And doesn't the unique evil of terrorism justify continued U.S. support, even if Israel often responds harshly?
   In fact, this argument is not a compelling moral justification either. Palestinians have used terrorism against their Israeli occupiers as well as innocent third parties; their willingness to attack civilians is wrong and should be roundly condemned. This behavior is not surprising, however, because the Palestinians have long been denied basic political rights and believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As former Prime Minister Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he "would have joined a terrorist organization."114 If the situation were reversed and the Israelis were under Arab occupation, they would almost certainly be using similar tactics against their oppressors, just as other resistance movements around the world have done.115
   Indeed, terrorism was one of the key tactics that the Zionists used when they were in a similarly weak position and trying to obtain their own state. It was Jewish terrorists from the infamous Irgun, a militant Zionist group, who in late 1937 introduced into Palestine the now-familiar practice of placing bombs in buses and large crowds. Benny Morris speculates that "the Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews."116 Between 1944 and 1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist attacks to drive the British from Palestine and took the lives of many innocent civilians along the way.117 Israeli terrorists also murdered the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, because they opposed his proposal to internationalize Jerusalem.118 The perpetrators of these acts were not isolated extremists: the leaders of the murder plot were eventually granted amnesty by the Israeli government and one of them was later elected to the Knesset. Another terrorist leader, who approved of Bernadotte's murder but was not tried, was future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He openly argued that "neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat." Rather, terrorism had "a great part to play ... in our war against the occupier [Britain]." Nor did Shamir express regrets about his terrorist past, telling an interviewer in 1998 that "had I not acted as I did, it is doubtful that we would have been able to create an independent Jewish state of our own."119
   Of course, Menachem Begin, who headed the Irgun and later became prime minister, was one of the most prominent Jewish terrorists in the years before Israeli independence. When speaking of Begin, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol often referred to him simply as "the terrorist."120 The Palestinians' use of terrorism is morally reprehensible today, but so was the Zionists' re
liance on it in the past. Thus, one cannot justify American support for Israel on the grounds that its past or present conduct was morally superior.
   Another possible line of defense is that Israel does not purposely target noncombatants, while Hezbollah and the Palestinians do aim to kill Israeli civilians. Moreover, the terrorists who strike at Israel use civilians as human shields, which regrettably leaves the IDF no choice but to kill innocent civilians when it strikes at its deadly foes. These rationales are not convincing either. As discussed in Chapter 11, the IDF targeted civilian areas in Lebanon, and there is little evidence that Hezbollah was using civilians as human shields. While there is also no evidence that it has been official Israeli policy to kill Palestinian civilians, the IDF has often failed to take care to avoid civilian casualties when fighting against groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The fact that Hezbollah and the Palestinians target civilians does not entitle Israel to jeopardize civilian lives by using disproportionate force.
   There is no question that Israel is justified in responding with force to violent acts by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, but its willingness to use its superior military power to inflict massive suffering on innocent civilians casts doubt on its repeated claims to a special moral status. Israel may not have acted worse than many other countries, but it has not acted any better.

CAMP DAVID MYTHS